24/11/2020
first birthday was a welcome cause for celebration for the family of a Florida baby born without a large part of his head and skull. Little Jaxon Buell wasn't expected to survive more than a few days after he was born last year.
On Facebook, more than 100,000 people now follow the boy's remarkable survival story and the hashtag .
Doctors discovered something wrong in the baby's head shape during a routine ultrasound when mom-to-be Brittany was pregnant, but they didn't know the exact cause. After Jaxon was born, Brittany and Brandon Buell were told he had a birth defect called anencephaly that occurs when the beginnings of the nervous system form incorrectly early on in the pregnancy. Most babies with the rare condition cannot survive long past birth.
"Every doctor we've talked to is fascinated that Jaxon is here today, and they can no longer predict a prognosis," Brandon Buell wrote in a Facebook post. "We know the reality behind this better than anyone else, what Jaxon is up against, and that his life is already miraculous at this point."
Amazingly, Jaxon is marking many infant milestones: "He is talking up a storm these days, truly teaching himself how to communicate with us in his own way ... He is so normal in so many ways. He is a baby who is dealing with teething, he cries when he's hungry, he hurts from gas pains, he throws ups, he cries, he poops, he sleeps, he repeats."
But over the past few months, seizures, feeding complications and close calls prompted the couple to seek a second opinion, hoping they might find more treatments options to help Jaxon, the couple told The Boston Globe. They flew to Boston and went to the emergency room at Boston Children's Hospital where they were given a more specific diagnosis of microhydranencephaly.
