Spectacular transplant: Part of her skull was placed in the stomach (Pictures)

October 2, 2012
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To a former beauty queen doctors transplanted her a quarter of her skull to the stomach, after suffering a near-fatal accident.

The surgeons removed the back of the skull of Jamie Hilton and placed it in her abdomen, allowing the bone to keep alive and feed while the cerebral edema were decreasing.

Jamie Hilton, 36, who was Miss Idaho in 2009 said: “I remember lifting the dress, look down and see this lump in my stomach, and I thought, is this real?”.

“When I woke up, I was surrounded by my family. I could feel the joy when I opened my eyes, so the feel of the room was good before I saw my skull.”

Hilton’s skull remained in her abdomen for 42 days until it was re-implanted in a successful operation and now, three months after her near-death experience she returned home, and considers all ‘a miracle’.

Everything happened in a salmon fishing trip to Hells Canyon in Idaho in June and while trying to catch her first fish, she lost her balance and fell 12 feet on a rock. Her husband went down and found his wife unconscious, with no pulse and not breathing.
When he lifted her, she began to breathe again and was taken by helicopter to St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, with a severe brain edema.

The husband said: “I knew it was wrong, but I knew I had to get out of there as fast as I could.”

The family was warned about the next 72 hours, she could live or die and that’s when doctors took the decision to eliminate a quarter of his skull to brain swelling down.

Jamie posted a picture of the skull in her abdomen on her blog page titled “Miracles, believe in them,” as well as a photograph showing a scar running the length of the head.