by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer

(June 11, 2008) A six month-old unborn baby with a tumor the size of a grapefruit growing on her tailbone, was partially delivered, successfully operated upon, then returned to her mother’s womb where she continued to grow for another 10 weeks before being “born again.”

The story began when Laredo, Texas resident Keri McCartney was 23 weeks pregnant. Keri and her husband Chad brought their four children to the obstetrician’s office for the ultra-sound that would tell them the new baby’s sex.

“We had our whole family,” Chad McCartney told Ann Curry of the TODAY show. “Our four kids had piled into the van, and we headed to our routine ultrasound to find out what the sex of the baby was going to be. That was the big discussion on the way up, so there was lots of excitement.”

Just as they were beginning to see the image of the baby on the screen, a concerned look crossed the face of the ultra-sound technician. After rushing the McCartney siblings out of the room, the technician told Chad and Keri there was a large mass growing on their baby. The ultrasound image showed what looked like a balloon growing out of Macie’s tailbone. It was full of blood vessels and was as big as the baby. Although the tumor was noncancerous, it was still deadly.

“This tumor was gigantic,” said Dr. Darrell Cass, the fetal surgeon who led the team that performed the surgery. “It was the size of a grapefruit.”

The McCartney’s obstetrician said she had never seen such a tumor in all of her years of practice. However, after doing some research, she discovered that Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, which is only six hours away from Laredo, was one of only three hospitals in the world that specialized in such conditions.

“This is incredibly rare,” Dr. Cass said. “It’s about one in 40,000 births. Many times, these tumors can grow and remain small and they don’t really affect the fetus very significantly. In Macie’s instance, this tumor grew incredibly rapidly … and basically it was stealing the blood that her body needed to grow. She would have died if nothing had been done.”

The bad news was that their baby had less than a 10 percent chance of surviving the surgery. Keri and Chad faced a difficult decision. If they did nothing, their baby would die’ if they tried the surgery, she might also die. But surgery was Macie’s only hope.

While fighting back tears, Chad said that they opted for the surgery, then quickly decided upon a name for their little girl. “We wanted to pick a name that would be appropriate, so we named herMacie Hope — because that was all we felt we had.”

They traveled to Houston for the surgery, but before the procedure could begin, Keri had to be put under a very, very deep anesthesia, about seven times deeper than the average operation, so that the uterus would be very relaxed and not “think” that the pregnancy had ended.

When this was achieved, surgeons lifted Keri’s uterus out of her body and looked for a place where they could safely open the womb without disturbing the placenta. When they found the perfect spot, they extracted 80 percent of Macie Hope’s body, which weighed about a quarter of a pound, leaving the head and upper body in the womb.

Because exposing an unborn baby to the air could cause it to go into cardiac arrest, surgeons quickly removed the tumor and returned Macie to the safety of the womb. They carefully closed the uterus so that it would be water tight and not allow any of the amniotic fluid to leak out.

“Then we had to hope that the pregnancy was going to last,” Dr. Cass said.

It did. Macie Hope remained in the womb for 10 more weeks, enough time to recover the strength that the tumor had been stealing from her tiny body. She was born on May 3 and even though doctors kept her in the hospital until June 7, she appears to have suffered no ill-effects from the tumor except for a large scar on her back.

On the day before she was released from the hospital, a beaming Keri McCartney cradled the baby in her arms. Macie Hope slept through it all, prompting her mother to say, “Obviously she is completely at peace and content with it all.”

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