dayton is not in ohio

How’s that for a post title?

Some blog readers may know that my nephew Ebenezer Breckinridge Castleman was born in a miraculous way, going nearly to full term as an extrauterine abdominal pregnancy and being perfectly healthy. This means that he gestated entirely outside of the womb, in my sister-in-law Rebecca’s abdomen. That’s right, Eben and all the organs and everything were all mixed together. My bro’ and I like to joke that ‘Eben’ the sperm swam right up into the girls locker room, but didn’t stop there, and kept right on going out the back door. We figure he’s gonna be an amazing athlete. A good outcome for both mother and child in this situation is nearly unheard of in medicine, with mortality rates being extremely high for both parties. Normally they terminate the pregnancy as soon as this is detected, but by the grace of God, no one ever noticed that he wasn’t in her uterus until they performed an emergency C-section.

So, recently, a medical journal article has been published related to his birth. It actually focuses primarily on Rebecca’s placenta, and it’s full of unknowable technical medical jargon, but if anyone is interested, here it is.

On a side note, as I was reading the references at the end (don’t ask me why I was reading the references of an article I could hardly understand in the first place), I noticed a name that I recognized: JK Sessums.

J. Kim Sessums is a surgeon in Mississippi, Belhaven College graduate (our ‘family’ alma mater), and, in his spare time, a successful sculptor who has done bronze busts of a number of notable figures, including Billy Graham, Eudora Welty and Andrew Wyeth. I like this quote from his website reflecting on sculpting Andrew Wyeth, who personally requested that Kim execute his sculpture:

“There we sat, a country boy from Pennsylvania and one from Mississippi, discussing Edward Hopper and Thomas Eakins; the history of American art at its best. No big deal, I suppose, except that one of us was Andrew Wyeth, himself an integral part of that same history.”

I emailed Kim, and he confirmed that he was the same that wrote the article on abdominal pregnancies while a med student in Jackson, Miss. I had seen a show of his at Belhaven while I was a student, but it was strange way to finally make a personal connection.