When Alicia Bingham discovered that her daughter, Addyson, had myelomeningocele—the most extreme form of spina bifida—she quickly contacted the Fetal Care Institute at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center. Two weeks later, she’d traveled here from Arkansas and was ready for a new surgery to correct the condition in-utero, a procedure only performed at a handful of medical centers throughout the world.
“You don’t have a huge window of time to decide whether or not to do it,” Bingham says. “I wanted to do it, because the longer I waited, the more damage could be done.”
Addyson, at 22 ½ weeks, was one of the youngest babies ever to have received the surgery, which is “like a routine C-section, where the uterus will be opened, and the obstetrician will only expose the baby’s back,” says Dr. Samer Elbabaa.
Using a microscope, Elbabaa repaired the tissues around Addyson’s spinal cord. He had to move quickly, because the baby couldn't be exposed to the outside environment—all in all, the operation took between 20 and 40 minutes. “Then we put the baby back,” Elbabaa explains, “and say, ‘We’ll see you in a few months.’”
Alicia gave birth to Addyson at Cardinal Glennon on August 31. Addyson's back looked great, but Elbabaa had to do a minor touch-up where the skin hadn’t quite healed; Addyson spent 11 weeks gestating after the surgery, and her skin stretched and grew.
Though Addyson is still on the small side, Alicia says her daughter is doing well.
“I know I would have Addyson right now, even without [the Fetal Care Institute],” she says. “But I don’t know where she would be, what we would be facing… They saw me cry; they saw me laugh. They saw me in desperate need of a miracle. And they were able to give it to me.”
