Amarillo woman celebrates Mother's Day with her son after undergoing pre-birth surgery
Amarillo mother Edith Sanchez went through a minimally invasive fetoscopic procedure to repair the spina bifida on her unborn child.
"To be able to see him move his legs and his hands, that was a concern for the doctors that he may not be able to use his legs, but now seeing him do all of this, it's so rewarding," Sanchez said. "It's amazing what doctors are able to do now and what they did for me and my baby. My son gave me a gift. I gave him life, but he is a gift himself, just having him."
On Dec. 30, 2021, during her 20-week anatomy scan, Sanchez, along with her husband Cesar, received news that their first son might have spina bifida, a defect that occurs when the neural tube does not close all the way. The backbone, which protects the spinal cord, doesn’t form and close as it should. This can result in damage to the spinal cord and nerves and impair a child’s ability to walk.
"We were actually going in to find out the gender and were planning on having a gender reveal the next week and found out that they had seen abnormalities in his head during the ultrasound. They said it was more lemon shaped and referred me to Lubbock," Edith Sanchez said.
Shortly after that appointment, she was recommended to a maternal fetal medicine specialist in Lubbock who confirmed the diagnosis and told her about the Texas Children’s Hospital Fetal Center, along with the fetoscopic procedure to repair their son's spina bifida while in the womb, which was pioneered by the team there.
The family traveled to Houston on Jan. 26 for an initial consult with the team. On Feb. 2, Edith Sanchez underwent the in-utero surgery at Texas Children's Hospital Pavilion for Women.
The procedure is conducted through two tiny incisions in the uterus, using a small camera known as a fetoscope. The small scope guides the micro surgical instruments through the ports where the surgeon can close the defect, protecting the fetal spinal column and nerves from infection and injury for the remainder of the pregnancy. The uterus is returned to the abdomen, the abdominal incision is closed, and the individual's pregnancy resumes.
"With in-utero surgery, we double the number of children that can walk and we halve the number of children that need to have a shunt placed in their brain to deal with hydrocephalus, or water in the brain," said Dr. Michael Belfort, OBGYN-In-Chief at Texas Children's Pavilion for Women and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine.
Ares Sanchez was born a month early on April 14, and he spent a little over a week in the NICU. He is now thriving, and the family is looking forward to celebrating Mother’s Day together out of the hospital with their older daughter.
"He's progressing so quick, and now that we are home, he's eating and moving, doing things that babies do. You would never think he has a condition, and I'm not just saying that because he is mine. ... Even some of the things that the doctors were telling me that he might not be able to do or have, he is doing, and it's pretty amazing," Edith Sanchez said.
The Texas Children’s Hospital Fetal Center was the first center in the nation to perform this procedure to treat spina bifida, and it has since performed more than 130 of these procedures, more than any other fetal center in the United States.
According to Belfort, the team is in the process of acquiring FDA approval to allow surgeries utilizing the fetoscopic technique, like the one performed on Edith and Ares, to be performed on other in-utero conditions.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Amarillo mother undergoes in-utero surgery to repair sons spina bifida
