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 SAN FRANCISCO (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- It's every soon-to-be parents' worst nightmare. Everything seems OK, and then during a prenatal check-up they get the news -- baby has a deadly birth defect.
Baby Arissa Mangewala is healthy now, but her parents expected the worst before she was born. Doctors discovered a birth defect where her intestines protruded outside her body. She had the first of five operations when she was only a few hours old.
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"I didn't get to hug her or kiss her," Arissa's mother, Mina, says. "They had to take her in for surgery right away."
72 days later Mina and her husband Rob got to take Arissa home. "When we finally left with her, we just felt like we had to race out of there, like they were going to keep us in there," he says.
 Fetal Surgeon Hanmin Lee, M.D., not only operates on newborns like Arissa -- he also performs what are called fetal surgeries -- done in utero to correct birth defects that would kill a child if he waited to operate after birth.
"We can actually correct the defect and allow the child to be healthier or even survive an otherwise un-survivable birth defect," Dr. Lee, of University of California, San Francisco, tells Ivanhoe.
Fetal surgeries carry risks for the mother and there's no guarantee the child will benefit. But those risks are going down with better tools and imaging techniques. Doctors use them to travel into the uterus, see the fetus through endoscopes, and correct the problem.
 Dr. Lee says, "We are now doing procedures through needles ... In other instances, through instruments that are a size of a straw." Right now, doctors only do fetal surgeries in life-threatening situations because of the risks -- like a 50-percent chance the mom will go into pre-term labor. But a controversial study is underway to see if treating spina bifida in utero will mean a better life for kids, even though the condition is not usually life threatening.
Arissa's parents feel blessed she has a healthy future ahead of her -- and just celebrated her first birthday.
"Every day she just, she teaches me something new every day," Mina says. "She is so strong and so happy."
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, which offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, click on: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
If you would like more information, please contact:
University of California, San Francisco
Fetal Treatment Center
(800) RX-FETUS
(800) 793-3887
fetus@surgery.ucsf.edu
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