In 2018, 31-year-old Zhang Huihui became pregnant with twins. But there was a traffic vessel between the two fetuses, where one child was passively transfused to the other, and if it wasn't artificially blocked in time, neither child could be saved.
In order to save the children, only 19 weeks old twins, will be in the mother's stomach to undergo the first operation of life , the two children survival rate after surgery is only 60%.
Inside the belly of a pregnant woman, surgery on the fetus, the difficulty of the operation can be imagined, the twins can not survive?
Zhang Huihui and husband Wang Lei married for three years, this is Zhang Huihui second pregnancy.
This time, after checking to know that the twins, the couple is very happy, but also in the sneaky guess will not be the last baby to come back to them.
But such a good mood did not last long, this Zhang Huihui in the hometown hospital maternity check, the doctor told her, two children now the state is not normal.
One of the fetuses is too big, one is too small, if you do not find the cause in time to stop, the two children may not be able to keep.
Zhang Huihui froze, the first few checks are fine, why has it become this way? Husband Wang Lei did not dare to delay, decided to take his wife to a large hospital for treatment.
Zhang Huihui and Wang Lei came to the capital Beijing, where they wanted to find a ray of hope. By mistake, the couple arrived at the Third Hospital of Peking University.
Obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Wei Yuan, director of the hospital, offered the couple a treatment option: fetoscopic surgery, a procedure that few doctors can perform.
Huihui Zhang and the kids were lucky to run into Director Wei, who is an authority on the subject.
The disease is twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, where twins*** share a single placenta, and all the blood vessels overlap, making it very easy for accidents to occur.
The two children now have a single blood vessel connecting them, and the skinny fetus is passively transfusing blood and oxygen to the larger one, while the larger fetus is still absorbing when it already has enough nutrients.
If you don't stop this in time, one of them will die in utero because it's too skinny; the other, the larger fetus, could die of severe edema and heart failure.
Fetoscopy, on the other hand, is surgery performed on a fetus inside the pregnant woman's belly to artificially block the blood vessels that transport the two fetuses.
In order to preserve the two fetuses as much as possible, Director Wei decided to schedule the surgery for Zhang Huihui as soon as possible. The day after the couple arrived in Beijing, on November 16th, Zhang Huihui, who was about five months pregnant, was lying on the operating table.
The surgery required a great deal of experience and competence on the part of the surgeon, and Director Wei carefully inserted the puncture device into her belly.
Throughout the procedure, she had to be very careful, as soon as the movement was too large, it would have been fatal for both children.
The puncture machine is fitted with a fetoscope on top, which projects what's going on inside the pregnant woman on a display, which the doctor uses to identify the blood vessels that connect the two children.
The fetus is always in motion in the mother's body, and once the fiber optics don't hit the right spot, the placental blood vessels will bleed out, and the two children will remain unprotected.
Director Wei carefully moved the fetoscope, and finally found the part of the two babies with blood traffic among the many thin blood vessels.
Doctors will use a hair-thin fiber optic to coagulate this transfusion vessel, and any slight deviation could put both children in danger.
At 3:45 p.m., the operation, a race against time, ended successfully. But that didn't mean that the two children were safe to be born, and they faced an even bigger challenge.
The surgery was very damaging to Zhang Huihui's body, and after the surgery, she had persistent contractions and was still at risk of miscarriage.
Zhang Huihui lying in the hospital bed, distracted, she was worried about the two children after all this still can not keep, Wang Lei in the side of the non-stop comfort wife.
Fetoscopic surgery 10 days later, November 26, Zhang Huihui accompanied by her husband to the hospital review , the results of the examination of the Zhang Huihui relieved.
While one child is still small, it has stopped delivering blood and oxygen to the other, and if it stays that way, the child will be born safely.
Although this surgery was a great success, Twin Fetus Transfusion Syndrome is likely to recur. The couple will need to travel from Tangshan to Beijing every half a month for rechecks.
Wang Lei has been careful to take care of his wife and child, out of the maternity ward are between wheelchairs to push his wife. The company's main goal is to provide the best possible service to its customers," he said.
But the sky is still a joke with them. On January 22, 2019, Zhang Huihui was 29 weeks pregnant for a maternity checkup, and the skinny child had another accident.
The two children were already 29 weeks, but the development of the smaller child was only barely 26 weeks. The growth of the smaller fetus was restricted after the last surgery.
If the baby continues to develop slowly and severe growth restriction occurs, the baby may die of ischemia and hypoxia.
The doctor offered two solutions: the first, now that the two children are seven months old, can be delivered by cesarean section earlier, or the small fetus may not be saved.
But the small fetus may not survive due to various complications. And the larger fetus will be born prematurely, and the baby may be at risk.
The second option is to abandon the small fetus and do everything you can to ensure the safety of the large fetus. Previous surgery in the mother's abdomen has blocked the transportation vessels for both children.
If the small fetus dies inside the mother, the growth of the large fetus will not be affected, and instead it can be delivered at full term with a much higher chance of survival.
The couple is caught in a dilemma, the first option may not be able to keep both children, and the second option, the small fetus will be sentenced to death.
In the hospital, Zhang Huihui received a phone call from her father-in-law, who was worried about the couple's difficulties, and has been consoling them: "If you feel uncomfortable, let's keep one, and there will be plenty more in the future."
Wang Lei rushed to his father and said, now there is nothing wrong, wait for the results of the examination. After hanging up the phone, Wang Lei received a call to meet with a pediatrician.
The cost of treating a premature baby is high, not to mention the fact that Wang Lei's family has two children. If the decision was made to have an early C-section, both children would need a lot of care and treatment once they were born.
The pediatrician first gave Wang Lei a precautionary shot: "What is the condition of the child, can only be born to know, respiratory and circulatory problems, infection off, sepsis are possible."
Wang Lei couldn't help but ask the question, what are the chances of survival of a smaller child? Doctors don't dare make a call, and now everything is unknown.
If the early cesarean section, a little better, two children's treatment costs about 200,000, once there is something unexpected, the treatment cost may be about 500,000 yuan.
Such costs for Wang Lei's family is a lot of pressure. Back in the hospital room, Wang Lei told his wife about these situations.
The two children need 100,000 yuan for the first treatment, and Zhang Huihui checked the bank balance: 25,000 yuan. The previous period of treatment, has shelled out a lot of money, two people can not afford 500,000 yuan of treatment costs.
Zhang Huihui: "We should not discharge the home, the small actually now the situation is not good, we strive to protect the big it." Wang Lei was a bit incoherent: "Drag it backward, the little one may recover it?"
After dinner, Zhang Huihui came to the neonatal ward, where there are just born healthy twin babies. Zhang Huihui looked at some silence, "A belly out of two children, really quite good."
In the end, Zhang Huihui and Wang Lei chose two children a piece of insurance, early cesarean section, Wang Lei: "Whether you can survive this hurdle, it depends on their own."
February 16, 2019, 33 weeks pregnant , Zhang Huihui suddenly contractions , the child's fetal heart deceleration, the original plan was the following Monday was forced to advance.
Doctors nervously do pre-operative preparations, not only obstetricians and gynecologists, pediatricians are also waiting in the maternity ward , the child was born to be emergency treatment.
Obstetrics and gynecology director Wei master knife, they first removed the smaller fetus, the child is the size of an adult's palm, weighing only two pounds, but also accompanied by respiratory failure.
Seven minutes later, the second baby, twice the size of the first, was born, and unlike his older brother, who breathed weakly, his younger brother cried out at birth.
The second baby was strong and kept crying, but he was next to the first baby, who had to rely on a respirator to keep breathing. Doctors placed the healthy baby in front of Zhang Huihui and gave it a look.
The smaller child, at this point, has been taken away by doctors on an emergency basis, and the child is headed to the pediatric intensive care unit for treatment. Obstetricians and gynecologists, who began stitching up Zhang Huihui.
The smaller Dabao needed to be on a ventilator all the time, and the premature birth, combined with the limited production, kept him away from the incubator for a long time.
The situation is not good for the larger baby, who is healthy compared to his brother. But his heart and lungs were limited by the premature birth, and his heart rate dropped when he drank milk.
Zhang Huihui and her husband have some blame, if they did not choose to early cesarean section, then the second baby should be full-term birth, do not have to suffer these.
With doctors' help, three days later, the heavier baby was transferred to a regular neonatal ward, where he was able to help himself to milk, but the older one still needed to be fed through a gastrostomy tube.
After the baby was born 25 days later, Zhang Huihui met the baby for the first time, and carefully held the bottle to feed the baby, holding the baby in her arms with the glow of motherly love.
A day later, Zhang Huihui and Wang Lei were discharged from the hospital with a healthy second baby, and a thin first baby still needs to be observed in the hospital for a while.
The morning after 45 days, Zhang Huihui and her husband waited in the corridor of the hospital early in the morning, and the doctor informed them that the recovery of the health of the big baby can also go home.
After so much hard work, both children were born healthy. Although the children's bodies will be a bit thinner than ordinary children, but for Zhang Huihui and Wang Lei has been the best result.
In the dilemma, Zhang Huihui could not go against her heart and chose to keep the two children, and fortunately, she won the gamble, and the two children were successfully born with the help of doctors.
Throughout the course of the treatment, several attending doctors tried to do everything they could, hoping that the two children would be born successfully, and they lived up to the family's expectations.
Doctors are always trying their best to save the lives of their patients.
Doctors are always trying their best to save every patient, and we should be sympathetic to them in our daily lives.
They have studied hard for many years to be able to cure patients and save them, but they will encounter some unreasonable patients. The tension between doctors and patients some years ago has chilled many doctors.
But doctors are still struggling with some of the 40-degree weather wearing thick protective clothing, heat to heatstroke collapsed, but they did not have a complaint.
Patients and doctors are sympathetic to each other, and will make the overall environment of society change a lot, and these need to work together.
Patients and doctors understand each other.