Ashlyn Julian was born as a healthy baby girl on May 16 but twenty days later, doctors discovered that she has a life-threatening aneurysm. Her brain was bleeding and the rare case needed a unique solution. The doctors were up to the task - they used superglue to plug the leaking blood vessel.
The sticky fix was performed June 5 by a team of doctors at The University of Kansas Hospital. The baby girl was too small to undergo the conventional surgical procedures so doctors had to think of an alternative.
"We did not know what the right answer was. This was not a textbook case," said Dr. Koji Ebersole, a neurosurgeon in Kansas, in an interview with CNN.
"We thinned the baby's blood so she would make clots on top of our instruments, which is risky because you don't want to thin the blood in the setting of a bleeding aneurysm, but we were going all or nothing at that point and I thought we could get it done," Ebersole continued.
So instead of opening the baby's skull to fix the problem, doctors opted to insert a small catheter into the child's leg, traced their way to the problematic blood vessel in the head of Ashlyn and applied a drop of surgical glue. The patient was so small that doctors did not have the right tools to do the job.
The glue did the trick and Ashlyn's doctors said that the barely a month old girl is recovering fast.
Though doctors have been using superglue for adult patients before, it has not been tried before with a newborn patient. "The first time that superglue has been used to fix a baby who is so young - superglue alone - I think it's the first time," said Ebersole.
Ashlyn's parents are very grateful to the doctors for saving their daughter's life. They had suspected of a problem 10 days after she was born.
"She was probably around 10 days old, and she was sleeping a lot, and I understand that babies sleep a lot, but to the point that you couldn't wake her up to feed her," recalled Gina Julian, the baby's mom. "We (went) from a baby that was very quiet to a baby that was screaming all the time and throwing up, and at that point we knew something was very wrong,"
Ashlyn was first rushed to the Children's Mercy Hospital where the problem was first discovered. The family was then referred to The University of Kansas Hospital that was better equipped to handle Ashlyn's case.
After the ordeal ended, all the parents and doctors can say is thank you to the superglue that made the full recovery possible.
