Lainey Ramos Arango is now snuggling her healthy five-week-old baby boy, Lucas. This precious time is all thanks to the doctors at Jackson Health System who saved the baby’s life by performing the first-ever in-utero embolization reported in Florida at Holtz Children’s Hospital.
At 35 weeks pregnant, Arango’s OBGYN discovered that her unborn baby had developed a rare blood vessel abnormality inside his brain.
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In Spanish, Arango said her world came crashing down because the prognosis was very bad.
“Baby Lucas had something called a vein of Galen malformation. That’s a direct connection in the brain where there’s a large pouch that connects the arteries to the veins," said Dr. Robert Starke, the co-director of endovascular neurosurgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital, and a UHealth-University of Miami Health System neurosurgeon and neuroradiologist. "The problem with that is there is high shunting of blood flow back to the heart, which tends to cause heart failure, lung failure and it also doesn’t allow the brain to develop normally."
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“A baby can have bleeding in the brain, but the worst is that the heart can fail and if the heart fails, then the baby can die,” said Dr. Rodrigo Ruano, the director of UHealth Jackson Fetal Care Center and division chief of UHealth Jackson Maternal-Fetal Medicine.
The survival rate for babies born with this rare condition is very low, so Arango was referred to Dr. Starke and Dr. Ruano.
Arango said she was worried about the procedure, but then made the emergency decision to give her baby a fighting chance.
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Along with their team of specialists across multiple disciplines, Dr. Ruano and Dr. Starke performed the first ever in-utero embolization reported in Florida at Holtz Children’s Hospital.
“We have a new idea that potentially if we treat these babies while they’re still in the womb, we can reverse problems in the heart and the lungs and also give the brain more time to develop normally,” Dr. Starke said.
The procedure was also only one of five cases performed so far in the United States.
“We use a long needle with ultrasound to go directly into the mother’s abdomen and into that vein, and then we can go in with a tiny little straw and place coils to block the malformation and reduce the flow,” Dr. Starke said.
After the surgery, Arango gave birth to a healthy baby boy via C-section. Lucas is thriving and growing thanks to the life-saving efforts of these doctors.
“Why is this baby a miracle? Because we did the procedure in utero and then the baby was born at 39 weeks term by C-section to protect the head and the baby stayed in the NICU just for a week. Usually, those babies stay there for many months, so that’s a miracle,” Dr. Ruano said.
Arango said she is immensely grateful to her doctors and in love with her miracle baby.
