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Baby Saved by Superglue: Doctors Glue up Brain Aneurysm

By Cheri Cheng | Update Date: Jun 11, 2013 10:21 AM EDT

A 20-day-old baby girl was saved by the good judgment of her doctors and a little bit of glue. Ashlyn Julien was born on May 16 and was considered to be a healthy baby. However, within days of bring her home, Ashlyn's parents noticed that something was different and possibly wrong with the health of their newborn child. After Ashlyn's behavior shifted from being sleepy and quiet to crying and loud, her parents rushed and brought her into the hospital.

"She was probably around 10 days old, and she was sleeping a lot, and I understand that babies sleep a lot, but to the point that you couldn't wake her up to feed her," Gina Julian, the baby's mother explained according to CNN Newswire. "We [went] from a baby that was very quiet to a baby that was screaming all the time and throwing up, and at that point we knew something was very wrong."

At the Children's Mercy South, located in Kansas City, the doctors noticed that Ashlyn had a raised spot on her head in the region called the fontanel. After an ultrasound revealed that something was wrong inside of Ashlyn's head, she was transferred to The University of Kansas Hospital where the doctors there, headed by pediatric neurosurgeon Koji Ebersole located the aneurysm that was the size of an olive.

The entire surgeon team got together to repair the bleeding in the infant's brain. They first inserted a catheter into Ashlyn's blood vessel on her right hip. The catheter was then navigated through her vessel all the way up to her neck. A microcatheter was then navigated through this vessel and up through her brain next to the aneurysm. With a little bit of sterile surgical superglue, the doctors successfully sealed the vessel and stopped it from bleeding in less than 45 minutes.

"It's literally the same compound as the superglue you'd find in the store," Ebersole said according to the Kansas City Star. "I think she's going to have a perfectly normal life."

Ashlyn will return to Children's Mercy for more supervision. She will have a check up after six months. The doctors are optimistic that Ashlyn will not have to worry about having an aneurysm again. 

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