For four months, one Illinois mom listened to her doctors who said that her newborn baby girl had chronic nasal congestion and a sinus infection, however, her gut was telling her something more serious was going on.
For the first four months of baby Macie Becker’s life, she suffered horrible congestion, often had trouble breathing, struggled to hold her own head up, and had a hard time eating from her bottle. Yet every time mom Becky Becker brought the issues up with her doctors, they said she was just congested. “She couldn’t breathe,” recalls Becky. “I had to run a shower every night to give her a night bottle.”
“Something in my mommy genes told me something was wrong with her and I just had to get to the bottom of it,” Becky said. “So at her 4-month check-up, I said ‘enough is enough. I want to go to an ENT (ear, nose, and throat) specialist.'”
“He says, ‘The good news is you don’t need me, bad news is, you’ve got to go straight to Cardinal Glennon,’” Becky said. “He says, ‘Your daughter has a lot of fluid on her brain.’ Your heart just sinks.” Once at the hospital, doctors realized that Macie had Vein of Galen malformation, which is a birth defect where arteries are directly connected with veins.
“It causes high pressure in the veins which usually have a very low pressure, and so everything that has to drain into the veins backs up, some of the fluids in the nose and so on,” explained Dr. Randall Edgell, an SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Neurologist. “And that’s what made her appear to have a stuffy nose.”
Doctors explained how babies born with this birth defect typically die within a couple hours of birth, which is why it’s so shocking that Macie survived over four months with it. For the next nine days, Macie underwent four life-saving surgeries that blocked blood flow to the malformation.
“I tell all my friends you go with your gut, just go,” said Becky, whose persistence likely saved her daughter’s life.
Watch the entire video below to see how far baby Macie has come since her surgery.
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[Featured image: KTVB]
Mom Saves Baby’s Life After Pushing Doctors For More Tests is an article from: LifeDaily