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Being Born ‘Twice’ Saved This Little Girl’s Life
Meet LynLee Boemer, the one-of-a-kind baby who was born twice.
At just 16-weeks into LynLee’s mother’s pregnancy, Margaret Boemer found out that her daughter-to-be had a tumor in her tailbone. The tumor, which appears in around 30-70,000 births, complicated her pregnancy and didn’t give Boemer’s daughter a strong chance of surviving since the tumor and the fetus were competing for blood.
“They saw something on the scan, and the doctor came in and told us that there was something seriously wrong with our baby and that she had a sacrococcygeal teratoma,” Boemer explained. “And it was very shocking and scary, because we didn’t know what that long word meant or what diagnosis that would bring.”
Boemer was then faced with a difficult decision. Knowing her daughter would be unlikely to survive, she could either terminate the pregnancy or undergo a high-risk surgery to help save her daughter.
Boemer choose the surgery, which required removing the baby from the uterus and operating to remove the tumor.
“LynLee didn’t have much of a chance. At 23 weeks, the tumor was shutting her heart down and causing her to go into cardiac failure, so it was a choice of allowing the tumor to take over her body or giving her a chance at life,” she explained. “It was an easy decision for us: We wanted to give her life.”
So, with the final plan to operate, Boemer’s daughter was “born” at 12 weeks before her official due date. The doctors operated for about 20 minutes removing what they could of the tumor while keeping a steady monitor on LynLee’s heart rate.
Twelve weeks later, Boemer had another c-section and officially welcomed her daughter. LynLee had to have another operation at just eight days old to remove the leftover sections of the tumor.
Thankfully, both operations were successful and Boemer and her daughter were able to go home a few weeks later.
“It’s kind of a miracle you’re able to open the uterus like that and seal it all back and the whole thing works,” Dr. Darrell Cass, the doctor who performed the operation, shared.