SHOCKING! BABY BORN WITHOUT SKIN, DOCTORS FIGHTING TO KEEP HIM ALIVE.
Home > News Shots > WorldBy Vinershea | Apr 20, 2019 03:02 PM
A baby's arrival is the happiest day for any family. So was it for 25-year-old, Priscilla Maldonado, who delivered a son on 2019 New Year's Day. But she was terrified to see her new born baby connected to tubes and wires, with bandages covering his body where his skin should have been.
According to The Washington Post, Maldonado said when the baby was born she heard her son's soft cries - and then the hospital room fell silent. No one told her she had a healthy baby boy. No one told her how much he weighed or how long he was. No one even brought him to her and lay him on her chest. Which confused and surprised her. Instead, she said, doctors and nurses wrapped him up and rushed him out of the room.
"I was worried. I was confused. It took me half an hour or more to know what the matter was," she said in a phone interview with The Washington Post.
Hours later, Maldonado was escorted to the newborn intensive care unit (NICU) at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. There, she seen her new born son for the first time- connected to tubes and wires, with bandages covering his body where his skin should have been. To her surprise, her son has skin only on his head and parts of his legs; the skin on his neck, chest, back and arms, hands and feet was missing. She could not even look into her newborn son's eyes, because they were fused closed.
"I asked what was wrong with him - was he going to survive. They said they didn't know, that they had never seen a case like that," Maldonado further told the Washington Post.
Later doctors told her and her husband, Marvin Gray, that they suspected her son had aplasia cutis congenita, a rare congenital condition in which babies are born without skin or sometimes even bone on their scalps. The condition can involve other areas of the body as well. She and her husband were later advised to take their newborn home, make him comfortable and let him die.
Later in the week, the baby was transferred to Texas Children's Hospital in Houston where doctors explained that with epidermolysis bullosa, (there is a layer of skin, but it is thin, appearing transparent or even nonexistent). So the condition is incurable, and that although patients with mild cases can lead normal lives, those with severe forms requires numerous surgeries to remove scar tissue and replace damaged skin with healthy skin.
Following that the baby underwent his first surgery at Texas Children's Hospital to remove scar tissue from his neck, which had fused his chin to his chest and made it difficult for him to breathe. After the surgery, the mother took to social media, saying that so far the child is "doing wonderful" and hope he recovers faster.