Doctors are urging parents to save their baby’s teeth, which could be a lifesaving treasure if the child develops a potentially fatal disease as they grow.
In 2016, 7-year-old Jenson Wright was diagnosed with leukemia ravaging 65% of his tiny body.
This was his 2nd cancer diagnosis – when Jenson was only four, he had lymphoma and leukaemia – and since two rounds of chemotherapy failed, his parents were losing hope that their boy would survive.
According to an old Facebook post shared by his mother Carolyn, the cancer was destroying his “body like a wildfire, so rapid, we feared the outcome would be every parent’s nightmare.”
But then a miracle happened.
“A mother in Texas gave the gift of a future to Jenson the day her child was born by donating her umbilical cord. A selfless act by one parent to another,” Carolyn writes of the stem cell-rich umbilical cord that was stored by the other mom for future medical purposes.
Umbilical cord blood
Stem cells are described by the Mayo Clinic as special cells that “self-renew.” These healthy cells can also become “other cells that do different things in a process known as differentiation.” To further clarify, stem cells can become “brain cells, heart muscle cells, bone cells or other cell types.”
Only five days after the groundbreaking surgery, the healthy new cells from the cord blood started killing the disease inside Jenson.
