Remember this photo from 1999 during a surgery at Vanderbilt University Hospital?
As they opened the uterus to do surgery, the baby reached out their tiny hand and grasped the finger of the surgeon.....
What if doctors could operate on a baby’s beating heart before birth?
At just 26 weeks, surgeons opened a mother’s uterus, placed an IV in her baby’s tiny hand, and removed a tumor from her baby’s heart. Ten weeks later, that child was born.
On Going Rogue with Lara Logan, Dr. Bill Lile, known as “The ProLife Doc,” shares remarkable advances in fetal medicine, including lifesaving surgeries, blood transfusions, and treatments for spina bifida.
Lara Logan: https://www.instagram.com/p/DfPwhVfM1NF/
Story behind the photograph
The photograph was taken during a medical procedure to fix the spina bifida lesion of a 21-week-old fetus. The operation was performed by a surgical team at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The team, Dr. Joseph Bruner and Dr. Noel Tulipan, had been developing a technique for correcting certain fetal problems in mid-pregnancy. Their procedure involved temporarily opening the uterus, draining the amniotic fluid, partially extracting and performing surgery on the tiny fetus, and then restoring the fetus to the uterus back inside the mother.
The photograph was taken on 19 August and the baby (Samuel Alexander Armas) was safely delivered on 2 December.
