At home in Kansas City with parents Bonnie and Parrish and sister Sparrow, Flynn is developing normal motor skills and is "very smart," his mom says.
“I was always worried that there would be bad news,” she says. “But each time the images showed that he kept getting better. His lungs kept expanding. Eventually we could see his right lung, which was great because originally it looked like it didn’t exist.” “He experienced good lung growth for four weeks. Remarkable lung growth,” Yang says. “According to the MRI, his lungs doubled in size.”
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EXIT PROCEDURE s Flynn’s delivery approached, his parents were told that he still might require a period of support on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine while his lungs continued to grow. The ECMO machine removes blood from the body and passes it through a membrane that exchanges carbon dioxide for oxygen before returning the blood to the body. The procedure can result in side effects. “CDH patients who go on ECMO have a lower chance of survival and can have a higher rate of learning disabilities and other developmental issues,” Yang says.
Flynn’s birth was scheduled for Nov. 22, 2010, in the operating room just upstairs from the Dana Brown Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at SSM Cardinal Glennon. Flynn entered the world through the exit procedure, another recent development in fetal surgery. “In an exit procedure the baby is partially delivered through a cesarean section incision,” Yang says. “The baby remains attached to the placenta through its umbilical cord, so the mother continues to supply blood flow. That gave us time to take Flynn out and make sure his airway was clear. When everything was safe and the baby could breathe, we cut the umbilical cord.” The delivery was attended by 30 medical professionals – complete teams for mom and baby.
to figure out why he had such a dramatic response so we can duplicate it in the future,” Yang says. A recent grant from the Fred Saigh Foundation to the Fetal Care Institute at SSM Cardinal Glennon and SSM St. Mary’s will be a huge catalyst for developing more life-saving procedures and building more awareness of the work being done by the center’s amazing surgeons and fetal care specialists.
More support and financial donations will assist further research and advance the groundbreaking work of this institute, where each year dozens of precious babies are being saved while still in the womb. “The Foundation has been instrumental in supporting the Fetal Care Institute, from initial
funding for instruments to helping build the new clinic space, which was designed specifically for mothers,” Yang says. “We are very indebted to the Foundation and all their donors and hope to make them proud of their investment.” Flynn underwent surgery a few days after his delivery to repair his diaphragmatic hernia. He spent seven weeks in the neonatal unit before traveling home. At 13 months of age, Flynn is beginning to pull himself up and stand. “It is wonderful to see what he can do.
We are very indebted to the Foundation and hope to make them proud of their investment.” As Bonnie recovered from the haze of anesthesia, she had one question on her mind. “I repeated over and over – ‘No ECMO? No ECMO?’ They kept reassuring me that Flynn did not need ECMO and everything was good. They wheeled my bed into the NICU so I could see him. It was amazing,” she says. Flynn Baker, a full-term boy weighing more than 7 pounds, made history that day as the first baby to be born following a successful hydrogel tracheal occlusion. Yang and Vlastos will continue to track Flynn’s growth to evaluate the outcomes for the tracheal occlusion procedure. “He had an excellent response. We are hoping
Developmentally he is two or three months behind most kids, but he is very smart,” his mother says. “He points and does baby sign language and a lot of the fine motor skills most kids do at this point. His gross motor skills are still coming along because of the effects of the hernia surgery on his abdominal muscles. “We are so thankful that we have Flynn. We believe he would not have survived without that procedure. How awesome the people at the Fetal Care Institute were. They took good care of us,” Bonnie says.
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