Baby With 3 Percent Chance to Live Heads Home, Mom Refused Abortion

International   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Sep 20, 2012   |   4:43PM   |   London, England

Out of England comes the miracle story of Jacob Reed, a baby whom doctors gave just a three percent chance to live. Now, he his home with his family after beating the odds and a six month hospital stay.

Reed clung to a small hope for survival after being born with a rare medical condition that was so difficult to overcome, doctors suggested more than a dozen times to his mother, 26-year-old Pippa Stanley, that she should consider having an abortion.

The London Daily Mail has more on the story of the infant, who was born with internal and external juvenile xanthogranulomatosis, a disease that affects just one in three million infants.

According to NIH, in the U.S., xanthogranulomatosis “is a rare benign condition, which usually presents with characteristic skin lesions and can be diagnosed clinically. However, systemic JXG may involve a wide range of extracutaneous sites and may pose a diagnostic dilemma for the clinician, radiologist, and pathologist.”

Juvenile xanthogranuloma is a histiocytic tumor that usually appears at birth or during the first year of life. But that didn’t stop the little boy:

Jacob fought on and has finally been taken back to the family home in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, for the first time.

Miss Stanley said: ‘The doctors all said he had no hope, no hope at all – but now he’s home. We were told he had a 3 per cent chance of survival but as each week passed he just got better and better.’

He has been on the brink of death several times and once even had to be resuscitated by his own mother. But now, in spite of doctor’s dire predictions, Miss Stanley can finally give her son his first cuddles.

Miss Stanley and her partner Tim Reed, 32, were overjoyed when they found out they were expecting twins in September last year, 12 months to the day after suffering a heartbreaking miscarriage. But problems became apparent 12 weeks into the pregnancy and the couple discovered that one of the twins had sadly died.

The pair feared that the tragedy of September 2010 would be repeated two-fold. But Jacob refused to give up his chance of life, something he proved a month later when his mother’s waters broke.

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The Daily Mail has the full story and pictures of Jacob and his parents. Photo credit: London Daily Mail.