By: Amanda Ziminski
We obviously know that the medical field is very important, that is why it is such a great field to go into. There will never be a time where people will not need medicine or health services. If we get sick or injured, we go to the clinic or emergency room and we usually get better. However, medicine is so much more than just handing out medicine and pain relievers. With the rapidly growing technologies and discoveries being made, doctors and other health professionals have the capabilities to perform some truly amazing things. I read an example of this tonight online on the U.S. Daily.
Little LynLee Boemer was destined to die while still in her mother's uterus. Her mother had gone in for a routine 16 week check up, when an ultrasound revealed a sacrococcygeal teratoma, a tumor that was attached to Lynlee's tailbone, that was growing rapidly. "The teratoma is the most common tumour we see in a newborn," said Dr. Darrell Cass, co-director of Texas Children’s Fetal Centre and associate professor of surgery, pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College Medicine. "Even though it’s the most common we see, it’s still pretty rare." Sometimes doctors can delay surgery until after the birth, but in LynLee’s case the tumour was competing with the foetus for the body’s blood flow, so it becomes a competition. As the tumour grew bigger, the baby’s health deteriorated and doctors had no choice but to act. Margaret, LynLee's mother, said: ‘LynLee didn’t have much of a chance. At 23 weeks, the tumour was shutting her heart down and causing her to go into cardiac failure, so it was a choice of allowing the tumour to take over her body or giving her a chance at life.
The doctors chose to operate on the 24 week old fetus. The surgery took five hours which entailed LynLee to be lifted outside of the uterus. The surgeons removed as much of the tumor as they could and then placed LynLee back inside of her mothers uterus and sewed the uterus back together again. They allowed LynLee to grow for another 12 weeks until she was delivered again via C-section. A few days after LynLee was born she had a second operation to remove the rest of the tumor that was already growing again. After several weeks she was finally able to be brought home.
Due to modern medicine babies like LynLee are given a fighting chance at life. A chance they would not have received even a decade ago. Medicine not only saves lives, it betters them. Examples can be found all over the media, such as the little boy who received a hand transplant and is now able to hold his mommy's hand as he crosses the street, or an middle aged man whose doctors found a blockage in his heart before a heat attack had is chance of brewing, or that vaccine you received when you were little so you didn't end up paralyzed from polio like so many generations before us. Medicine has and always will be a highly important part of our lives and I cannot wait for the day I can add to it's greatness.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3865188/The-baby-born-twice-Mum-s-joy-girl-taken-womb-life-saving-operation-returned-birth.html#ixzz4NxRxClbn
No comments:
Post a Comment