A Nigerian surgeon based in the US, Dr Oluyinka Olutoye, and his surgeon partner, Dr. Darrell Cass of Texas Children’s Hospital accomplished an extraordinary surgery to save LynLee Hope when she was a 23-week-old fetus.
LynLee underwent the crucial operation to treat a tumor know as ‘sacrococcygeal teratoma’ before she was returned to her mother’s womb. She healed and continued to grow until she was born at 36 weeks.
Margaret Boemer went for a routine ultrasound 16 weeks into her pregnancy with her third child, but discovered that things were far from routine.
“They saw something on the scan, and the doctor came in and told us that there was something seriously wrong with our baby and that she had a sacrococcygeal teratoma,” the Texas mom said in an interview shared by Texas Children’s Hospital.
“And it was very shocking and scary, because we didn’t know what that long word meant or what diagnosis that would bring,” the mother said.
Sacrococcygeal teratoma is a tumor that develops before birth and grows from a baby’s coccyx, the tailbone. It occurs in one out of every 35,000 births, mostly girls.
“Some of these tumors can be very well-tolerated, so the fetus has it and can get born with it and we can take it out after the baby’s born,” said Cass, co-director of Texas Children’s Fetal Center and associate professor of surgery, pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College Medicine.
Cass explained that the tumor is trying to grow by sucking blood flow from the baby, yet the baby is also trying to grow too, “so it becomes a competition. And in some instances, the tumor wins and the heart just can’t keep up and the heart goes into failure and the baby dies,” he said.
“LynLee didn’t have much of a chance,” Boemer said. “At 23 weeks, the tumor was shutting her heart down and causing her to go into cardiac failure, so it was a choice of allowing the tumor to take over her body or giving her a chance at life. It was an easy decision for us: We wanted to give her life.
Cass and his partner surgeon, Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye, then performed the emergency fetal surgery. By this time, the tumor was nearly larger than the fetus. They operated for about five hours before placing LynLee back inside the womb and sewed her mother’s uterus shut.
“It’s kind of a miracle you’re able to open the uterus like that and seal it all back and the whole thing works,” said Cass.
The mother was on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy, and despite her pain, she marshaled her strength and made it another 12 weeks to nearly 36 weeks — full term — when Lynlee Hope was born for the second time via C-section on June 6. She weighed 5 pounds and 5 ounces.
After she was born, LynLee faced one more ordeal: removing the bits of tumor that surgeons could not reach, which had begun to grow again.
“At eight days old, she had more surgery, and they were able to remove the rest of the tumor,” explained a proud Boemer.
Baby Boemer recovered in the NICU and weeks later, arrived in her family home.
She is bouncing with life already.
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