So I was watching Discovery Fit and Health yesterday (they were airing a lot of baby/pregnancy shows) and there was one that I hadn't ever seen before. It was called Extreme Births. It had 4 stories of families going through rough times during their pregnancies. I love all birth related shows, and this one seemed to fit right along with what we are going through, having our little guy due in 2 months. I was really excited to watch it.

First there was a baby that had developed a large tumor on her tailbone region that had to have surgery to remove the tumor at around 25 weeks while she was still in utero. Then there was a couple that was expecting sextuplets and had to deliver very early and have them in the NICU for awhile. Needless to say, I was shocked when the 3rd story was about a baby named Charlie who was diagnosed with CDH!

However, I was really disappointed with the way that it was portrayed. I don't believe that they ever said the words congenital diaphragmatic hernia. They did show a computer animated graphic though, that showed the hole in the diaphragm and the organs pushing up through.

But perhaps the most frustrating part for me is that they kept saying over and over that this baby had a 0% chance of survival if actions weren't taken while he was still in the womb. They ended up inserting a small balloon into his windpipe to keep the fluid in the lungs and try to get the smaller left lung to grow. It did help that lung to grow in his case, thank goodness. They said that after the procedure, he would have about a 30% chance of survival. That still seems pretty low to me, if the baby was otherwise healthy.

But after the birth, it showed him in the NICU and he looked like he was doing pretty well. But it never really followed up on whether or not he got to go home. And it never once mentioned surgery to repair the diaphragm. This was my first time ever seeing something like this on TV, and it was just really disappointing for me. Or maybe it's just that it scared me pretty bad. The fact that they were going on and on about how the balloon procedure raised his chance of survival, and that there was absolutely no way that he could have survived otherwise...

That's not what I have been hearing from my doctors. And the show didn't mention anything else being wrong with the baby, so I was just really surprised to hear all of this.

Has anyone else seen this show? I think it originally aired sometime last year. Probably on TLC. I think that the parents of this baby were from the UK. They had accents. So maybe things are different over there? It just really surprised me, because it contradicted most everything I have heard from my doctors.