Due to a rare disease, 8-year-old Harry's genitals are not developing normally and he has a "vagina" in his groin. Harry also has a number of other birth defects.
Harry's mom, Lyanne Owen, 40, was very upset when her newly born son Harry was diagnosed with three holes in his heart, a curvature of the spine, and kidney problems. Moreover, the boy had no anus and no urethra.
Harry survived through 12 surgeries (including an ostomy and a colostomy - a bag for excreting fecal matter), but as he developed, his mother noticed that his genitals were not developing quite normally. It turned out that Harry has a rather rare birth defect called a split scrotum. In the area of the scrotum, he has a cleft, on the sides of which there are two folds of skin, similar to a vagina.
When Leanne, then pregnant with her third child, found out about this, she experienced a strong shock, which caused her to have a miscarriage.
After finding the birth defects of the genitals, the doctors gave Harry the final diagnosis - VACTERL: (V) = vertebral anomalies; (A) = anal atresia; © = heart defects; (T) = tracheal abnormalities including tracheoesophageal (TE) fistula; (E) = esophageal atresia; ® = kidney and thumb abnormalities; and (L) = other limb disorders.
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Currently, science does not know exactly which defects in genes or chromosomes cause VACTERL. And the boy's mother reproaches the doctors - an ultrasound examination should have revealed these disorders even before the child was born. In any case, new plastic surgeries await him in the near future.
