Baby Born Without a Face Survives and Did the Unthinkable

Baby Born Without a Face Survives and Did the Unthinkable

Humans are a tenacious bunch. We’ve been through so much, yet we continue to soldier on. While the story we’re going to tell you today is about someone extraordinary, a small angel that came to this world and survived even though all the odds were stacked against him. One in 20,000 human infants is born with acrania, a rare facial abnormality that develops inside the fetus. It is a neural tube defect which can be defined by the partial or total absence of the fetal skull. The face and base of the skull are present, but the brain is visible because of the deformity.

Matthew Gelato, a one-year-old born to Isabella and Raven Gelato, is one of the individuals affected by this disease. A significant portion of Matthew’s skull is missing, and the cranial part of his face is made up of flat bones. Matthew’s parents speculate that Matthew’s unusual facial condition may have been brought on by Isabella taking over-the-counter capsules containing phenylephrine HCl, chlorphenamine maleate, and paracetamol for a week during the first month of her pregnancy while she was experiencing fever. According to Mirror Online, no medical expert has however backed up this hypothesis.

The physicians looked at Isabella’s first ultrasound two months prior to Matthew’s caesarean delivery in a hospital in Santiago, northern Philippines, and told the couple that Matthew’s prospects of surviving past a few weeks after birth were extremely poor. According to Raven, “I shook, felt lethargic, and almost passed out in the delivery room when I first saw a kid. He was virtually faceless.” It is a horrible experience for any parent, after all, seeing your child in so much pain for the first time can shake a person to their core.

Even though Matthew’s health was critical, he was released from the hospital the very next day, but his mother was detained in the intensive care unit for another two weeks of observation. Matthew was able to continue living by taking drops of milk and vitamin supplements on a daily basis. Despite the dismal prognosis, Isabella’s been told by doctors that it would be too dangerous to perform major surgery on her son Matthew’s face because of his young age and the fact that he only weighs 11 pounds.

Nevertheless, the baby’s mother is keeping her fingers crossed that a remedy will become available in the near distant future. There’s nothing like a mother’s love and devotion to her child and despite the fact that every reporter diagnosis was negative, the mother still believed that her kid could survive. “It’s just amazing,” she says. “He’s battling for his life and we should do everything in our power to meet his day-to-day requirements and never give up hope for a brighter future for our firstborn child.”

She said, “We’re not going to let go. We’re all fighting and praying that one day with the grace of God and the improvement of medical knowledge, I’ll be able to see the gorgeous face of Matthew who is a gift from God to our family.”

Matthew’s father doesn’t have a good job and is only able to earn four dollars a day working at a factory. Now, you can imagine the difficulty this puts the family in. Matthew’s medical bills alone must cost in the thousands, but so far the parents have managed to get the child any treatment he needs thanks to constant support from their relatives and friends. This is one thing we love about humanity; whenever there’s a crisis, we have a way of coming together and rising to the occasion.

The parents have decided against keeping the child in the hospital. According to them, “We desire to have a sense of our baby’s bodily presence as well as being able to embrace and kiss him, because the name Matthew implies a gift from God, we decided to give him that name.”

In May, the family made the trip from Santiago City to the Philippine General Hospital in Manila, which is 361 kilometers away, in order for Matthew to undergo a variety of clinical and laboratory procedures and in the hopes of discovering a treatment option for his uncommon condition. It was determined by the medical staff at the hospital that reconstructing infant Matthew’s face would put him in danger due to the fact that his frail frame of 11 pounds could not endure significant surgery.

Although many of you may be thinking that the child is living numbered days, there’s some good news. There have been cases where children have been known to survive through this disease and one such case is from Japan. The child was born to a 29-year-old Japanese woman. Doctors detected the problem in the 35th week of the pregnancy and the child was born in the 38th week through normal delivery. Like Matthew’s parents, this couple also believed their child would make it through this horrible illness and they decided to give the kid a fighting chance. The kid had to go through multiple surgeries, but he did survive and made it through the ordeal.

Now, you may be wondering about the causes of this disease, while we can rule out genetics as the cause. This means that it isn’t likely that it’s a hereditary occurrence. Acrania has no known familial links and recurrence rates are incredibly rare. On the precise mechanism causing acrania, little is known. Acrania is thought to have several origins similar to other developmental abnormalities. Recent studies suggest that mutations in the H-hat genes might be a result of the illness among other problems. It is a loss-of-function mutation in H-hat that leads to this disease. Hedgehog (Hh) proteins are produced post-transcriptionally and H-hat is required for this process. Long-range Hh protein synthesis declines proportionally to a decline in H-hat production. The production of fibroblast growth factors, bone morphogenetic proteins, and extracellular signal-related kinases, all of which are crucial for the patterning of the craniofacial region, is disrupted when Hh levels fall. Acrania and numerous other craniofacial patterning issues result from disruption to these pathways which causes a burnt bone in cartilage production.

We know this might have gotten a little too technical, but we had to identify the problem. So what are the potential deterrents to this deformity? It has demonstrated that dietary fortification, adding extra micronutrients to food, and folic acid supplementation reduces the incidence and recurrences of NTDs. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advise mothers of previously affected children to take 4 milligrams of folic acid daily, 10 times the dose advised for all pregnant women, starting at least one month before conception and continuing through the first trimester. Folic acid supplements during pregnancy reduce the risk of NTD recurrence by 72 percent. Some common foods that contain folic acid include bread, cereal, pasta, flour, and even cornmeal.

So here’s to hope that no family is affected by this disease, and we can only hope and pray that science comes up with something that can rid our children of this dreaded issue. Just imagine seeing your kid in this situation; the very thought is enough to send shivers up anyone’s back. Now there are ways to stop this from happening, but they usually include terminating the pregnancy. This might sound difficult to do, after all, it’s your child, but you have to weigh the pros against the cons. Okay, your child is born, but what sort of life would this little kid have? They will have a troubled life, always going in and out of the hospital, the pain they must have to suffer, and finally their tiny heart will just stop beating and they’ll go on to a better life.

So putting your baby through this, and not to mention the mental and financial stress you’ll be undertaking, makes everything that much more difficult. But if you’re ready to take this stress and have faith that something good is going to come your way and your child is going to make it through, and by all means go through the pregnancy, and maybe just maybe your child may get a fighting chance. And sometimes that’s all someone needs. After all, kids have come back from far worse diseases and have gone on to live relatively well-rounded lives.

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