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  #1  
  08-29-2013, 05:36 PM
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A picture began circulating in November. It should be "The Picture of the Year," or perhaps, "Picture of the Decade." It won't be. In fact, unless you obtained a copy of the U.S. paper which published it, you probably would never have seen it.

The picture is that of a 21-week-old unborn baby named Samuel Alexander Armas, who is being operated on by surgeon named Joseph Bruner. The baby was diagnosed with spina bifida and would not survive if removed from his mother's womb. Little Samuel's mother, Julie Armas, is an obstetrics nurse in Atlanta. She knew of Dr. Bruner's remarkable surgical procedure. Practicing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he performs these special operations while the baby is still in the womb.

During the procedure, the doctor removes the uterus via C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby. As Dr. Bruner completed the surgery on Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon's finger. Dr. Bruner was reported as saying that when his finger was grasped, it was the most emotional moment of his life, and that for an instant during the procedure he was just frozen, totally immobile.

The photograph captures this amazing event with perfect clarity. The editors titled the picture, "Hand of Hope." The text explaining the picture begins, "The tiny hand of 21-week-old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother's uterus to grasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life."

Little Samuel's mother said they "wept for days" when they saw the picture. She said, "The photo reminds us pregnancy isn't about disability or an illness, it's about a little person" Samuel was born in perfect health, the operation 100 percent successful. Now see the actual picture, and it is awesome...incre dible....and hey, pass it on! The world needs to see this one!





Curious where his life led?

http://www.foxnews.com/photoessay/0,...ofHope_450-jpg

Fascinating and uplifting story.
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  #2  
  08-29-2013, 08:15 PM
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Sorry Kim, but this is a myth that was proven to be a hoax/BS more than decade ago. It's used as pro-life propaganda, which is why Fox News (faux news) is making something out of nothing. Or in this case, less than nothing, seeing how it's all garbage.

This is from way back in 1999, and was proven false in 2000. I remember it. The "photographer" is a hack non-journalist pro-lifer from Tennessee.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/medical/thehand.asp
http://urbanlegends.about.com/librar...andofhope3.htm

Quote:
The surgeon, Dr. Bruner, later elaborated on some of the exaggerated and false claims made about the photograph: "It has become an urban legend," says Bruner, the Vanderbilt University surgeon who fixed the spina bifida lesion on Samuel. Many people he hears from wonder whether it's a fake.

"One person said the photo had been reviewed by a team of medical experts and they had determined that it was a hoax," Bruner says with a laugh. More commonly, people want to know how the photo came to be. Some opponents of abortion have claimed that the baby reached through the womb and grabbed the doctor's hand.

Not true, Bruner says. Samuel and his mother, Julie, were under anesthesia and could not move. "The baby did not reach out," Bruner says. "The baby was anesthetized. The baby was not aware of what was going on."
Quote:
Surgeon Joseph Bruner: "Depending on your political point of view, this is either Samuel Armas reaching out of the uterus and touching the finger of a fellow human, or it's me pulling his hand out of the uterus ... which is what I did." (Quoted in The Tennessean, Jan. 9, 2000)
The doctor reached in to see if there were still signs of life, because using anesthesia on a fetus was still very experimental.

From what I remember, even the family didn't believe the BS. (If they say different now, they're being revisionists. Though note that the story does not in any way quote them, or interview them.)

Nor should you.

What's interesting is that back in 1999, Fox News was NOT the right-wing nutbag network that it is now:

Quote:
In 1999 Matt Drudge hosted a Saturday night television show called Drudge on the Fox News Channel. In Nov 1999 he attempted to show Samuel's picture on his Fox News program, but was not allowed to by the network. This led to his leaving of the show for what he claimed to be the network's censorship. Fox News directors didn't want to use the picture because they feared Drudge would use it to support a pro-life argument. They viewed this would be misleading because the tabloid photo dealt not with abortion, but with an emergency operation on the baby for spina bifida.
I remember those days, too, when Fox was worth watching.
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  #3  
  08-30-2013, 03:55 AM
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Well part of the miracle is poofed..but the surgery, it was real? Correct...

Still a pretty amazing accomplishment.

Well, as one who had in uterine surgery.....still amazed with our technology, got my little one here.


For those who don't know, I had a child that developed under my ribs, and once she began developing inside the rib cage, she was too large to drop down - so it required breaking my ribs to extract her- however before we could even do that, her arm was pinched in between and they had to go in, and remove a rib, to allow her to finish growing...without removing her.

Pretty insane stuff that medical advancing allows us to do.

Today, Kennedy is 7 months old- literally, today.

I lost two ribs, but she is a happy and healthy baby.


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  #4  
  09-09-2013, 07:54 AM
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She's little beam of sunshine who scored big in the mother category.
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