Baby Born With Massive Cyst Growth on Her Neck Can Breathe & Cry Despite Doctors’ Prognosis

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“I have never felt a flood of joy like I did that moment we heard our daughter cry,” mom Chelsea Jones recounted of the suspense-filled moments after the birth to their baby daughter Eden. Chelsea and her husband, Taylor Jones, had been told that their daughter might not be able to breathe after birth due to cysts in her neck blocking her airway.

The doctors didn’t expect her to live much more than a day. Eden was just getting started with defying the odds, however. Three years later, this survivor who suffers from cystic hygroma continues to amaze her parents and medical professionals with her will to live.

Chelsea and Taylor Jones, who live in Rhondda, Wales, were delighted to find out that they were expecting their first child. But a sonogram at 20 weeks revealed a strange mass on the baby’s neck. They would later discover that these were fluid-filled sacs—the result of malformed lymph nodes.

The Joneses, who had never heard of cystic hygroma, began doing research. But what they found was hardly comforting. “What we didn’t find was much hope,” she wrote on Love What Matters. “We were told Eden wouldn’t be normal. We were told she would be malformed.” All this, before they even had a chance to welcome their baby into the world. The parents-to-be weren’t giving up, though.

As Eden’s due date approached, as Jones writes, “Doctors were concerned about its size putting pressure on her airways. We were told surgery would be a normal course of life for years to come.”

At 39 weeks, doctors decided it was time for Eden to come into the world. The parents had mixed emotions. “Will she survive? Will she be breathing? Will I get to see her before they take her,” Jones wrote. On the one hand, they couldn’t wait to see their new daughter. Yet, she was comforted by the thought that “as long as the baby was inside me, she was fine because I was breathing for her,” as she wrote.

Finally, the delivery day came. “There were so many doctors and nurses who had to be involved in the delivery of Eden, that they actually filled the whole corridor outside the OR [operating room],” she wrote. “I got in and was followed by a team of nearly 20 specialists, nurses and surgeons.”

Throughout the delivery, the parents were as nervous as could be. When Eden was finally born, Jones wrote:

“I heard the most beautiful loud cries! I can’t even tell you what I felt at this moment in time, everyone was in complete shock.”

Once doctors had made sure that Eden was breathing normally, Taylor and Chelsea Jones only had a moment to hold her before the baby was whisked off to the NICU.

When the moment for Mom, Dad, and baby to all be reunited came, as Jones recounts, “I couldn’t believe our beautiful baby was there in front of my eyes [and] instantly felt whole again.”

The Joneses had to learn a lot about their daughter’s condition before they were allowed to take Eden home from the Children’s Hospital. “We were medically trained,” she wrote. “We knew more than some doctors did about her condition, about her cystic hygroma.” The road from there hasn’t always been easy, though, as Eden has had surgeries to reduce the size of the cysts in her neck as well as her tongue.

But her parents would never go back. As her dad, Taylor, wrote on Instagram: “I have a lot of people telling me I have bad luck. Granted we’ve been through some pretty rough times, but I still feel like the luckiest man alive.”

Not only has Eden survived to celebrate her third birthday, she has also become a big sister with the arrival of a new baby named Auggie. Her parents are focused on giving her a great childhood rather than worrying about what is out of their hands. As Chelsea Jones wrote on Love What Matters, “We won’t let Eden’s illness define her and although we can’t do anything about her having it, we want to give her the best chance of beating it (physically and emotionally).”