Bizarre: Baby born twice.

(Baonghean.vn) - Thanks to modern medical techniques, American baby girl Lynlee Hope was born twice: the first time she was surgically removed from her mother's womb and then returned to it to full term.

Lynlee Hope was born twice. Photo: CNN.

Margaret Boemer went for a routine ultrasound when she was 16 weeks pregnant with her third child. The doctor informed her that her baby had a sacrococcygeal teratoma – a rare condition.

"We were shocked and really scared because we didn't know what the long phrase the doctor said meant and what danger that diagnosis would pose to the baby," Margaret recounted.

According to Dr. Darrell Cass, director of the Texas Pediatric Center, mesenteric teratoma is a tumor that develops in the fetus and originates from the baby's tailbone.

Girls are at a higher risk of developing this tumor than boys, with approximately 1 in 35,000 births. In many cases, the tumor will develop alongside the fetus and will be removed after the baby is born.

However, in Boemer's case, the tumor grew aggressively and increasingly larger, "stealing" blood supplies from the fetus, causing her baby to weaken day by day.

Other doctors advised her to terminate the pregnancy. However, Dr. Darrell Cass and his team suggested another option: fetal surgery. Of course, this option wasn't 100% successful. In fact, the chances of the fetus surviving were very slim.

Boemer said that at 23 weeks of pregnancy, the tumor had grown and was pressing on the fetal heart, posing a risk of heart failure for the baby. She chose to have fetal surgery in the hope of saving her daughter's life.

At 23 weeks and 5 days of gestation, doctors performed emergency surgery. At that time, the tumor was larger than the fetus. The surgery lasted 5 hours, involving the removal of the fetus, the removal of most of the tumor, and the return of the baby to the mother's uterus.

Although the surgery was successful, Boemer was instructed to remain bedridden for the remainder of her pregnancy. After 12 weeks, when the fetus was nearly 36 weeks old, baby Lynlee Hope was born for the second time via cesarean section, weighing almost 2.3 kg.

LynLee's health was assessed as fairly stable; however, 8 days after her second birth, she had to undergo surgery to remove the remaining part of the tumor.

The second surgery was also successful. The health of the girl who was born twice is now completely normal, just like other children.

Thanh Huyen

(According to CNN)