Margaret Boemer was pregnant with her third child; that was 16 weeks old. She went for a routine ultrasound. There she found out that things were getting serious. She found out that her baby had sacrococcygeal teratoma, a type of tumor that develops at the base of the tailbone and occurs in one out of every 40,000 pregnancies.
“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 Plano, Texas, The mother 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 baby (Lynlee Boemer) was just 1 lb, 3 oz. when doctors removed a tumor from her body that weighed almost as much as she did. She was taken from her mother Margaret Boemer’s womb so that the doctors could perform a five-hour, life-saving surgery. The surgeons then placed Lynlee back inside the womb and sewed the uterus shut.
Margaret didn’t think that she would be going through the open fetal surgery.
“I knew we were doing this to try and save her life,” Margaret from Lewisville, Texas, told. “That’s all I could focus on.”
“It was a complete shock to us,” she says. “And it was very concerning to the specialist. She had never seen one so huge.”
According to the doctors, the actual removal of the tumor was not the most difficult or time-consuming part but the opening of the uterus was the hardest. They had to do it without causing health issues in the mother.
However, as the tumor was so large in this particular case, Boemer had a huge incision. The removal process was complicated, during which the baby was also taken out of the womb.
“Essentially, the fetus is outside, like completely out, all the amniotic fluid falls out; it’s actually fairly dramatic,” continued the doctor. By that point, medication from the heart doctor was important, since the child’s hearbeat had even stopped for a moment, due to her removal from the uterus.
The operation, however, was successful in spite of the risks. The woman had complete bed rest for the residue of her pregnancy, before giving birth to her child the second time, on June 6.
Boemer’s little girl is doing well after all that, celebrating her 4th month out into the world.
