The Happy Pod: The baby saved by surgery in the womb
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Olen Shannon Maldonado, käsintehtyjä artesaanituotteita myyvän Jaui lahjakaupan perustaja. Valitsin Shopify, koska alustoja testatessani totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helppokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulla oli tärkeää pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittavat työkalut, kuten varaston suunnittelu, ovat kätevästi dashboardissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu shopify.com-sivustolla. I'm Helena Burke and in this edition from the BBC World Service. Fetal surgery is coming into its own now. So this kind of operation will become more common. It is such an amazing joy to me. The surgical breakthrough that's changing the lives of newborn babies.
How German charity is tackling drownings. She would tell the child that it's very important.
Don't you want to try it? It's so important that you know how to swim.
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The story of a blind man who's become a champion of the boxing ring. And cats rolling down hills in barrels and bringing religion to Martians.
This guy had a dream. He believed he had a plan. He had all these things set up. There was an academy. He recruited people. There was training and everything. So for us, we just focused on the positivity.
The true story of an unusual space program comes to the stage. We start with a truly remarkable surgical breakthrough. He's a little miracle, isn't he? There's your smile. That's five-month-old Theo and his mum Maisie Savage, who underwent pioneering surgery while he was still in the womb. Twenty weeks into the pregnancy, Maisie and her partner Josh French were told parts of Theo's bowels and intestines were growing outside his body, a potentially life-threatening condition. But, as you may have heard on the Global News podcast, the couple from London were offered the chance to travel to Texas, where surgeons had been developing a way to fix the problem before birth. Dr Michael Belfour, who performed the operation, believes the technique could be used to treat many other medical issues.
I do think that fetal surgery is coming into its own now, so this kind of operation will become more common. We're certainly waiting for the final results of this trial, but the initial results are really encouraging. Clearly, you will need specialized fetal centers. But the technique that we pioneered at Texas Children's Hospital is now being used all over the world for spinal bifida surgery. And I think once we prove that this is a new surgery that can be done in the same way, it will spread rapidly. It is such an amazing joy to me. I get videos from people and photographs almost every day thanking our team. It's such a privilege. I'm nearing retirement now and to see that this field is developing the way it is, is such a godsend.
Theo is only the third baby in the world to have this operation. Without it, he probably would have needed months in intensive care and multiple surgeries after he was born. His parents, Maisie and Josh, spoke to my colleague, Lewis Vaughan-Jones. He's amazing. He's doing so well.
Yeah, we're loving parenthood, having a healthy, normal, noisy baby at times. But no, he's fantastic. I'm so pleased that you are both smiling, despite obviously sleep deprivation and all the normal things that go along with parenthood there. But just take me back, if you could, to when you first found out that something was wrong, Maisie, and what the kind of feelings you went through at that point.
Yeah, when we found out, I was 20 weeks pregnant and we were just going for our normal anomaly scan. The feelings that we had were just worry, anxiety, like we were just overwhelmed. We'd never even heard of gastroschisis before. So it was all so new and just really scary. We didn't know what it meant for Theo or what it meant for us as a family. And it was just the unknown and the waiting.
And then, Josh, the decision to go ahead with this new way of treating this, was it both of you thinking, right, we're just going to go for it, an easy decision or not?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:29
2
What groundbreaking fetal surgery saved baby Theo before birth?
6:29–15:08
3
How did Maisie and Josh decide to travel to Texas for the operation?
15:08–20:01
4
What impact could fetal surgery have on other medical conditions worldwide?
20:01–27:57
Speakers
10 identifiedMore from Global News Podcast
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