’So thankful’: Doctors perform rare procedure to safely deliver baby girl

By Brooke Butler

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    SAVANNAH, Georgia (WJCL) — Earlier this month, a team of 31 medical specialists at Memorial Health in Savannah successfully performed a rare, high-stakes procedure to ensure the safe delivery of a baby girl, who otherwise may not have been able to breathe on her own at birth.

During a routine 20-week ultrasound, Raegan and Josh Barnard discovered their unborn daughter, Charlotte, had a significant growth under her tongue. The mass was pressing against the back of her throat, creating a life-threatening obstruction to her airway.

“It was kind of overwhelming at first, just nervous and fearful of what all of that meant,” Raegan Barnard said.

Doctors felt the Ex Utero Intrapartum Treatment (EXIT) procedure, a complex operation performed during a C-section, was the best option for baby Charlotte’s safe delivery. Only a limited number of specialized centers across the country can offer EXIT procedures.

“We actually delivered the top half of Charlotte and the bottom half was still inside the uterus, allowing us to be able to leave her attached to the placenta and the umbilical cord so that she could continue to get the blood and oxygen that her brain and her body needed while we worked on getting a breathing tube in and ensuring that we could provide that support for her,” said Dr. Brad Buckler, medical director of the Level 3 neonatal intensive care unit at Willett Children’s Hospital.

Buckler said they practiced the procedure before the delivery actually happened.

“We did dry runs where we brought everybody into the O.R. and had a fake patient on the bed so that we could go through this step by step, so that we had every single angle covered that we possibly could think of that might go right or wrong on that day. Luckily, everything went exactly as we wanted and planned to have,” Buckler said.

In the weeks following her birth, Charlotte received drug therapy to reduce the size of the growth on her tongue. Charlotte stayed in the NICU for two weeks before being discharged home.

“She’s been a normal baby. She eats and does everything she’s supposed to,” Raegan Barnard said.

The Barnards, now safely home in Claxton with their thriving baby girl, recently reunited with some of the medical professionals involved in their daughter’s birth.

“We’re just so thankful for all of them,” Barnard said.

Dr. Keisha Reddick, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at Memorial Health, said, “I’m always elated and rejoice when I can see patients on the other side, because I can only imagine, you know, when you’re going through this process, the stress of the unknown.”

Doctors said they still plan to have surgery to remove the remaining growth on Charlotte’s tongue, but they want to wait until she is at least a few months older. They said they feel confident Charlotte will go on to live a happy and healthy life.

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