Baby Surgeons: Delivering Miracles
Meet the MEDICAL TEAM performing life-saving operations on unborn babies
C4 HD, 9pm
A new series filmed at St George’s Hospital in London follows women experiencing complex pregnancies.
FOR THE LAST year, C4 cameras have been following the Fetal Medicine Unit in London’s St George’s Hospital, as they help babies with pioneering treatments before they’ve even been born.
In the first episode of this three-part series, we see Professor Basky Thilaganathan and his team operate on pregnant Becky, whose unborn daughter has a rare tumour.
‘The tumour was stopping her lungs developing and causing the heart to fail,’ explains the professor.
TINY BODIES
But with Becky 19 weeks pregnant, it was a high-risk operation. ‘The baby’s chest is three or four centimetres in size, so if we’d missed by a millimetre there was a risk the heart could have stopped,’ he says.
The team has operated on babies even younger than Becky’s and, in the past, Professor Thilaganathan’s team has put shunts [tubes used to drain fluids] into fetuses that are just 14 weeks old.
‘The feeling of helping a couple is priceless,’ he explains.
‘But that’s balanced by the cases that don’t go as you’d hoped, which are very sad.’
This week’s episode also follows Ann-marie, who’s lost one of her triplets and discovers another is suffering from selective growth disorder, as well as Randika and her partner, Paul, who both have dwarfism and hope to finally start a family after three miscarriages.
With the unit covering an area of southern England that usually sees around 50,000 births a year, the cases the team deals with are exceptionally rare, but making the series provided a unique experience for Professor Thilaganathan.
‘I’ve never felt under pressure in surgery, because you’re so focused,’ he says. ‘But the producers asked me to watch the first episode recently, and I could barely sit through it, as I was so nervous watching myself during an operation!’