A surprising finding that no mother wants or expects was made during a routine ultrasound.
According to reports, doctors noticed what looked like a huge bubble being blown just above the baby’s mouth as Tammy Gonzalez of Miami, Florida, was having the standard surgery.
“Is that on me or the baby?” Gonzalez questioned the physician.
Upon closer examination, the physicians determined that the amorphous bubble was a teratoma. About 1 in 100,000 infants are affected by teratomas, which are incredibly uncommon and typically fatal tumors, according to Diply. According to reports, Gonzalez’s doctors advised her to discontinue the pregnancy in order to prevent a miscarriage.
Gonzalez insisted that something could be done to preserve her child, but she declined.
“They told me that type of tumor can grow so fast,” Gonzalez said to ABC News. “I said, ‘There must be something we can do.’”
Thank goodness, she discovered endoscopic surgery, a treatment that had never been tried before. When confronted with that dangerous surgery, her reaction was straightforward: “Let’s do this.”
The procedure was carried out for the first time by Dr. Ruben Quintero, head of the Jackson Memorial Hospital’s fetal therapy center in Miami. He made a quarter-inch cut in Gonzalez’s abdomen and inserted a tiny camera and surgical instruments into the amniotic sac.
Gonzalez was conscious during the entire process.
“I couldn’t feel the incision because of the local anesthetic, but I could feel the tube going into the sac,” she stated. “It felt like a popping balloon.”
Quintero allegedly used the camera to get a close-up look at the tumor and calculate the danger of removing it.
“It was a decisive moment,” the physician declared. “We went ahead and cut the stem, and sure enough the tumor fell right out.”
When Gonzalez saw the tumor on the ultrasound move away from her baby’s face, she expressed relief.
“It was amazing,” she continued. “It was like a 500-ton weight lifted off of me.”
The tumor stayed floating in the womb until the actual delivery four months later because it was too large to be removed through the amniotic cell sac. It had considerably shrunk by then.
“She’s perfectly fine,” Gonzalez said of her daughter Leyna. “She has a tiny scar on the roof of her mouth. She talks, she drinks. She is my little miracle child.”
