Ontario mom grateful for groundbreaking in-utero surgery that saved her baby

CTV National News: Historic surgery saves life A medical team in Toronto made history by preforming a new kind of lifesaving in-utero surgery to save a child. Peter Akman reports.

An Ontario mother says she never doubted the team of doctors and medical staff who performed life-saving surgery on her baby boy – while he was still in the womb.

Kristine Barry told CTV News Channel on Wednesday that her now two-month-old son Sebastian is expected to lead a normal life, after doctors in Toronto performed a tricky in-utero procedure on his heart weeks before birth.

“He’s doing amazing,” Barry said from her home in Barrie, Ont., north of Toronto, as she cradled little Sebastian in her arms.

When she was 23 weeks pregnant, Barry and her husband discovered that the baby had two congenital heart defects. Scans showed that Sebastian’s aorta and his pulmonary artery were switched, and he also had no openings in the walls between the upper and lower chambers of his heart. That would have prevented his blood from circulating properly after birth and put his life in danger.

Doctors at Toronto’s Mount Sinai and Sick Kids hospitals decided to perform in-utero surgery to open up a hole in the wall between the two chambers of Sebastian’s heart. The procedure involved inserting and inflating a tiny balloon to create the hole.

“As crazy as it sounded, it was a much better alternative to a caesarean and then having a very short window of opportunity to do the balloon procedure,” Barry said.

Despite the high-risk situation, Barry said hospital staff never gave her “any reason to doubt them.”

“I knew that no matter what happened that day…that (Sebastian) was well looked after,” she said.

The procedure was successful and Sebastian underwent more surgeries after his May 23 birth to ensure proper blood flow and heart function.

He’s now happy and healthy, although doctors are still monitoring his heart and arteries, Barry said.

“As for development, they say that he’s to develop as a normal child should,” she added.

With files from The Canadian Press