Solving the mystery of a shapeshifting neck tumor

Jaedin, 10 years old, holds the control for a remote-controlled race car, Christmas 2017. Amanda Brown couldn’t shake an uneasy intuition that something just seemed “off” throughout her second pregnancy. During a scheduled caesarian section at her local hospital in North Carolina, her instinct proved to be true. “I had given birth to my first son by C-section so I knew what to expect,” Amanda says. “But this time around, as the surgeons totally stalled in the middle of the delivery, I thought to myself, ‘it doesn’t take this long to pull a baby out.’” When her son Jaedin was finally delivered, Amanda and her husband were shocked by their first sight of him. “Jaedin had a huge mass on the left side of his neck that looked like it was growing out of his ear,” Amanda says. “The doctors told us they didn’t know what the mass was and that they would have to take him to a nearby children’s hospital right away.” Living in scary uncertainty There, doctors guessed that the cause of Jaedin’s mass might be a lymphatic malformation (LM), a group of abnormal growths that contain fluid. Yet although they extracted a large amount of fluid from his mass, they were troubled to see that the mass was filling back up with fluid and rapidly changing its shape. It seemed that it might not be a lymphatic malformation after all. By the time Jaedin was a month old, Amanda’s stepmother went online to search nationwide for a specialist in pediatric head and neck tumo...
Source: Thrive, Children's Hospital Boston - Category: Pediatrics Authors: Tags: Diseases & Conditions Our Patients’ Stories Center for Airway Disorders cervical teratoma Dr. Reza Rahbar germ cell tumor Neck and Skullbase Surgery Program at Boston Children's NICU Solid Tumors Center at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Source Type: news