Through the years we have seen a lot of miracles from great surgeons around the world such as Ben Carson when he first separated conjoined twins successfully. Yet recently, there was yet another when a US-based Nigerian doctor, Oluyinka Olutoye and his partner, Dr. Darrell Cass took out a baby from its mother’s womb, operated on it, and successfully returned it in the womb.
This feat was achieved at the Texas Children’s Fetal Center here are somethings you should know:
1. The Baby’s Condition
The reason behind the surgery was a tumor that was found to be growing in a baby in the womb of its mother when she was just a few weeks pregnant.
Margaret Boemer who is the mother of the baby got to find out that her baby was 16 weeks old had a condition that is known as sacrococcygeal teratoma, which meant that there was a tumor growing in the baby’s coccyx (close to her spine). What made it all even more complex was that if the baby was left to be born before the tumor was removed, it may kill her. This is because as the baby was trying to grow in the womb, so the tumor which was drawing blood from the baby was trying to grow.
More devastating to Margaret Boemer was that she was supposed to have a set of twins, but lost one of the babies earlier.
2. The Surgery
The best thing to do normally was to terminate the pregnancy, even as there was an option of what is known as the fetal surgery. While sounding very easy, the problem was that the chances of survival for the baby was too little and if things don’t go smoothly, the health of the mother may as well be tampered with. Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye and Dr. Darrell Cass who is a director in the hospital decided to give a shot at saving the baby’s life by carrying out the crazy surgery.
At 23 weeks and 5 days old, the doctors decided it there was no way to postpone the surgery if not the baby would die as the tumor was growing bigger than the baby.
Although they only spent 20 minutes working on the fetus itself, the operation took them as much as 5 hours because they had to be careful on the mother whose uterus they opened and worked on. During the surgery, the baby lost her heartbeat but was able to be revived.
That was all in 2016. Since then, the baby had grown in the mother’s womb and was born through C section on 6 June, and the baby who is described as the baby “born twice”, Lynlee Hope is still doing very fine.
3. Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye
At the lead of the surgery that saved the life of Lynlee Hope is a Nigerian doctor, Oluyinka Olutoye. He was born in Nigeria in Lagos. He began his secondary school at the Kings College Lagos. While growing up, his interest was in science and Medicine.
His journey to surgery was influenced by Dr. Christian Bernard who performed the first human to human heart transplant. It was when he read the biography of Bernard that he got to realize that one could carry out a surgery on a fetus and return it to the womb.
For his college education, the surgeon attended the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) Ile-Ife, where his interest in the medical school was on embryology. It was after he was done from here that he went for his residency program at the Medical College of Virginia. He continued his education with a Ph.D. at the Virginia Commonwealth University where he had a research on fetal wound healing where he found out that fetus can heal without a scar.
4. Personal Life
The doctor is married to Prof. Toyin Olutoye. The two met when they were at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) Ile-Ife. At the time, the woman who would later be his wife was Toyin Balogun. She is now a Pediatrics-Anesthesiology in Houston Texas.
What is even more interesting is that she was also a part of the team that was involved in the surgery.
5. The Glory
Although many people around the globe praise Dr. Olutoye and his colleagues for the feat, Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye insisted that the main person to praise is Margaret Boemer who is brave enough to allow for the surgery with the risks involved. The problem with such surgeries according to him is that there is the high possibility that both lives of baby and mother could be lost, but the mother was brave enough for it.
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He was, however, hosted by the Professor Yemi Osinbanjo who was then the acting vice president of the country.
