A British mother has praised the extraordinary efforts of her medical team after undergoing a rare and complex surgery to remove her womb—and unborn baby—from her body to save both her life and her son’s.
Lucy Isaac, a 32-year-old special needs teacher from Oxfordshire, was just 12 weeks pregnant when her dreams of motherhood were threatened by a devastating diagnosis: ovarian cancer. Doctors warned that she needed life-saving surgery immediately, and time was not on her side.
Her case was so complex that a team of 15 specialists at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford devised a bold plan: to lift her womb, with the unborn baby still inside, from her abdomen so surgeons could remove the cancer from both ovaries. The five-hour procedure had only been attempted a handful of times globally and carried enormous risks for both mother and child, according to the Daily Mail.
Miraculously, the operation was a success. Surgeons managed to excise the cancerous tissue while keeping Lucy’s womb attached to her cervix and left fallopian tube, maintaining critical blood and oxygen flow to the fetus via the uterine artery. Her womb was physically held by two team members throughout the surgery before being returned to her body.
Twenty-nine weeks later, baby Rafferty was born at 37 weeks, weighing a healthy 6lb 5oz (3kg). “The skill and the expertise that the medics had to enable us to not only survive the surgery, but for my pregnancy to continue relatively normally until 37 weeks when Rafferty was born—it’s just astounding,” Ms Isaac said. “And we feel, even in the midst of quite a horrible situation, just so immensely lucky.”
Lucy admitted the gravity of the situation didn’t fully sink in until the morning of the surgery. “My surgeon came to me and said, now when I take him out, I’ll wrap him in heat blankets and he won’t know that he’s out of your body. And it then really hit us how extreme the surgery was going to be.”
Despite the stakes, Lucy never doubted her medical team. “I never for one second doubted that we were just in the most capable hands,” she said. “Our whole time in the hospital has been an immensely scary time, but it has also been incredibly positive because of the care that we’ve received.”
She is set to undergo a final surgery next month, which she and her husband, Adam, hope will mark the end of her cancer journey. “It’s amazing,” Lucy said. “He is the most wonderful, gorgeous little boy… and we’ve got everything to live for now.”
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