<p>Atlanta doctors on Tuesday performed a rare surgery to repair a 2-year-old girl whose liver, stomach and bowels have grown outside her stomach.</p><p>ShaNiya Johnson suffers from a rare birth defect, in which the muscles of the abdominal wall did not close properly. The operation is designed to gradually expand a space in her abdomen, and paves the way for a second surgery next month in which doctors will place the organs into the expanded cavity.</p><p>ShaNiya is believed to be just the third or fourth young child to have the series of operations, which cost an estimated $80,000 to $100,000.</p><p>"We call her our miracle child," said her great-grandmother, Jessie Johnson.</p><p>The birth defect was spotted five months into the pregnancy, said ShaNiya's mother, 20-year-old LaTreveon Johnson of Stone Mountain, Ga.</p><p>"They said she wasn't going to live but two days," Johnson recalled, although her current doctor said he hadn't heard of such a prognosis.</p><p>ShaNiya's condition is called an omphalocele. What doctors call a "small" omphalocele, involving protrusion of a small portion of the intestine, occurs in one out of every 5,000 live births. A "large" omphalocele, like what ShaNiya has, occurs in one out of every 10,000 live births, according to medical references.</p><p>Less than one week after she was born, the girl underwent surgery to create a thick layer of skin to cover the protrusion. Doctors used excess folds of skin from around the abdomen.</p><p>They created an organ-containing sac that looks a little like a Nerf football that was squished, covered with a sheet of skin and then sutured down to the front of her belly.</p><p>It's been painless for her, and her organs are working despite their unusual positions. She talks and laughs and plays and runs, and sometimes even falls on her stomach, her mother said.</p><p>"She likes to show people. She shakes it around and does everything a normal 2-year-old would do," Johnson said.</p><p>However, Johnson said heard another parent tell her child not to play with ShaNiya 'because she's disabled.' Johnson fears the troublesome opinion may be an omen of future bias against ShaNiya if the condition goes uncorrected.</p><p>Worse, it's a dangerous way to live, said Dr. Greg Mackay, who performed the one-hour surgery Tuesday.</p><p>"She's got no protection. She is at high risk for injuries. She could run into anything and tear it," said Mackay, chief of plastic surgery at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston.</p><p>ShaNiya is also at an elevated risk that the her internal organs will twist, said Mackay, who had never performed the procedure before.</p><p>In the operation, Mackay and Dr. Richard Ricketts cut into the base of her abdomen, beneath the sac. They moved part of the bowel that was in the main body cavity and implanted a balloon-like device and partly filled it with roughly a half-cup of saline solution.</p><p>In future twice-a-week visits, they will fill the balloon more and more. The goal is to expand a space currently large enough to hold a grapefruit into an area twice that size. If successful, that will prepare the girl for a four-hour operation in May when the doctors will place the protruding organs in the space.</p><p>Until then, doctors will monitor the girl for any infection, nausea, abdominal pain or other potential post-operative problems. But so far things look good, Mackay said.</p><p>"It went great. She woke up fine," he said Tuesday evening.</p>
