In a gripping account of heartbreak and triumph, reality TV star Jennifer Snowden reveals what she went through last year when her unborn baby was diagnosed with a rare brain condition from which doctors said he could never recover.

Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, the 35 year-old Southern Charm star said her ordeal began last year when she was 15 weeks into her first pregnancy. This was when doctors discovered something was very wrong with her little boy.

“He just told me straight out, “Your baby has an encephalocele on his brain’,” Snowden recalled. “I didn’t know what that meant but he looked at me and started crying and left the room.”

Encephalocele is a rare condition that occurs when the neural tube – a narrow channel that folds and closes during the third or fourth week of pregnancy to form the brain and spinal cord – fails to seal. This results in an opening in the skull which can be located anywhere from the nose to the back of the head through which the brain protrudes. The cause is unknown and treatment depends on the severity and location of the encephalocele. It can cause problems ranging from brain and face defects to uncoordinated muscles, physical and mental delays and impairment, seizures, and vision problems. Surgery is the method used to treat the condition and longer-term treatment depends on the severity of the condition.

In baby Ascher’s case, the encephalocele was located near the back of his head.

She was referred to a specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina Children’s Hospital who informed her that 85 percent of women with this diagnosis terminate the pregnancy.

“She handed me the abortion papers and said you have eight weeks to decide if you’re going to terminate but we can book you in in two days time.”

Despite the emotional trauma she experienced at the time, she remembers asking the doctor if she had seen any case where a baby got better who had this condition.

“She looked at me and said, ‘No’.”

Even though her family was very careful to let her make her own decision, they favored terminating the pregnancy.

“When a specialist stares you down and tells you that’s what everyone else does and they have never seen any case of a woman keeping the baby and it going well that’s hard to deal with,” Snowden told the Mail. “I was told your experience of motherhood will never be like your friends. Your child may not know you, he may not be able to show emotions or feed himself or control his bowels. He will need 24-hour care and there are few people who can incur that daily expense. There was absolutely nothing good in what I was being told. It felt like an elephant had been dropped on me. I couldn’t breath.”

A fetal MRI at 18 weeks confirmed the original diagnosis and showed the encephalocele to be very large.

“I remember being told pretty much the same again when it came to Ascher’s prognosis,” she said.

But while meeting with the doctors, she encountered a pediatric neurosurgeon named Ramin Eskandari who seemed to be signaling that all was not lost.

“And I kept looking at Dr Eskandari and he was looking just at me. I was looking for a shred of hope and I saw it in his eyes. He said he couldn’t make any promises but that he would do what he could.”

She was still deliberating whether or not to end the pregnancy when she reached a turning point. It occurred during a conversation with her hairstylist after she told her about Ascher’s physical problems.

“She said ‘you don’t know what God can heal in the womb and you don’t have to be so sad. You’re sad because of this weighty decision but you just have to pray’.”

The advice struck a chord deep in her heart and even though she had never been very religious, she made the decision to keep the baby.

“I tore up the abortion papers and every single night I said a novena to St Joseph and St Gerard. I made God a promise. I promised him that if he healed my baby I would use the platform of the show to tell everyone what He’d done. I wanted my child to be a beacon of hope for other women, the one that I had looked for but couldn’t find.”

Comforted by her newfound faith and the flood of support she received from Southern Charm friends who rallied behind her in prayer, she was still terrified on the day of her scheduled C-section. There were 23 doctors in the room who assisted in carefully bringing Ascher into the world. Because the membrane around his partially exposed brain was so thin, any trauma could rupture it and cause instant brain death.

For only a brief moment, Ascher was laid on her chest just long enough for her to see him and feel her heart flooding with love. And then the child was rushed into surgery where doctors painstakingly put the exposed brain back into his head.

She had to wait two days to hold him but the first time she went into the neonatal intensive care unit she thought he looked like the healthiest baby in the room. “The others were fighting for their lives. He was only on a respirator while coming off anesthetics and on a feeding tube briefly.”

As of today, Ascher is hitting every milestone and proving to his adoring mother that miracles really can happen.

“I feel like in all my years I’ve lived life to the fullest but I didn’t feel like I had a purpose and that’s lonely. Now Ascher is my purpose and sharing his story so that maybe even just one woman who’s in the position I was in, sees there is hope.”

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