It's every parent's worst nightmare. Four months into Keri McCartney's pregnancy, doctors spotted a rare, and sometimes fatal, tumor growing on the baby's tailbone.
The tumor was stealing blood from Macie, so McCartney decided to seek help at the Texas Children's Fetal Center — one of only a handful of hospitals in the world performing prenatal surgery.
"At that point we didn't know — we didn't know what was going to happen," Keri told CBS News. "We just felt all alone, who will take us, who will help us through this.
At 25 weeks, surgeons decided to perform the surgery to remove the tumor. Doctors cut into Keri's abdomen, pulled out the entire uterus — and then half of Macie. Surgeons carefully cut away the noncancerous tumor, which was the size of a grapefruit.
"We don't bring the whole baby out of the womb because we don't want the uterus to think the pregnancy is over and the baby's coming out," explained Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye of Texas Children's Hospital.
Once free of the tumor, Macie was placed back in the womb, where she recovered and grew for a record 10 more weeks. Recently, there have been numerous stories about medical miracles and the miraculous power of a mother’s touch to revive babies. Whether you are a person of faith or not, you have to admit that Macie's s birth was nothing short of a miracle.
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