The Happy Pod: The baby saved by surgery in the womb

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hello, welcome to The Happy Pod. Hello, welcome to The Happy Pod.

**Helena Burke** (0:14)
I'm Helena Burke, and in this edition from the BBC World Service.

**Michael Belfort** (0:18)
Fetal surgery is coming into its own now, so this kind of operation will become more common. It is such an amazing joy to me.

**Helena Burke** (0:28)
The surgical breakthrough that's changing the lives of newborn babies. How a German charity is tackling drownings.

**Frieda von Malikrot** (0:35)
I would say, do you want to try it?

**Rebecca von Malikrot** (0:38)
She would tell the child that it's very important, don't you want to try it? It's so important that you know how to swim.

**Helena Burke** (0:47)
Also in this podcast.

**Adam Solan** (0:49)
If you can hear me and you can hear the passion in my voice in speaking about boxing, I know you can believe that, if he can do it, I can do it too.

**Helena Burke** (0:57)
The story of a blind man who's become a champion of the boxing ring. And cats rolling down hills in barrels and bringing religion to Martians.

**Musa Zulu** (1:06)
This guy had a dream. He believed he had a plan, he had all these things set up. There was an academy, he recruited people, there was training and everything. So for us, we just focused on the positivity.

**Helena Burke** (1:17)
The true story of an unusual space program comes to the stage. We start with a truly remarkable surgical breakthrough.

**Maisie Savage** (1:30)
He's a little miracle, isn't he?

**Kirsty Taylor** (1:32)
Maisie, smile.

**Helena Burke** (1:35)
That's five-month-old Theo and his mum, Maisie Savage, who underwent pioneering surgery while he was still in the womb. Twenty weeks into the pregnancy, Maisie and her partner, Josh French, were told parts of Theo's bowels and intestines were growing outside his body, a potentially life-threatening condition.
But as you may have heard on The Global News Podcast, the couple from London were offered the chance to travel to Texas, where surgeons have been developing a way to fix the problem before birth. Dr. Michael Belfour, who performed the operation, believes the technique could be used to treat many other medical issues.

**Michael Belfort** (2:12)
I do think that fetal surgery is coming into its own now. So this kind of operation will become more common.
We're certainly waiting for the final results of this trial, but the initial results are rarely encouraging. Clearly, you will need specialized fetal centers, but the technique that we pioneered at Texas Children's Hospital is now being used all over the world for spinal epiphytous surgery. And I think once we prove that this is a new surgery that can be done in the same way, it will spread rapidly. It is such an amazing joy to me. I get videos from people and photographs almost every day thanking our team. It's such a privilege. I'm nearing retirement now, and to see that this field is developing the way it is is such a god sin.

**Helena Burke** (3:06)
Theo is only the third baby in the world to have this operation. Without it, he probably would have needed months in intensive care and multiple surgeries after he was born.
His parents, Maisie and Josh, spoke to my colleague, Louis Vaughan Jones.

**Maisie Savage** (3:20)
He's amazing. He's doing so well.

**Louis Vaughan Jones** (3:23)
Yeah, with love and parenthood. Having a healthy, normal, noisy baby at times, but now he's fantastic.
I'm so pleased that you are both smiling despite obviously sleep deprivation and all the normal things that go along with parenthood there. But just take me back, if you could, to when you first found out that something was wrong, Maisie, and what the kind of feelings you went through at that point.

**Maisie Savage** (3:49)
Yeah, when we found out, I was 20 weeks pregnant and we were just going for our normal anomaly scan, and the feelings that we had were just worry, anxiety. We were just overwhelmed. We'd never even heard of gastrosthesis before.
So it was all so new and just really scary. We didn't know what it meant for Theo or what it meant for us as a family. And it was just the unknown and the waiting.

**Louis Vaughan Jones** (4:15)
And then Josh, the decision to go ahead with this new way of treating this, was it both of you thinking, right, just going to go for it, an easy decision or not? It, it, bare in mind, it was such a big decision. It was relatively straightforward because every decision that we wanted to make would just be what is best for Theo.
And so Maisie and I quickly said, if we need to drop everything and move to Texas, if it gives him the best chance, then that's what we need to do.