Baby born without skin still in NICU seven-months after birth

A San Antonio couple are still waiting for answers, seven months after their baby was born without skin on the majority of his body.

Ja’bari Gray was born on January 1, via emergency C-section after doctors were forced to induce his mother Priscilla Maldonado at 37 weeks.

He was born with skin missing from most of his body, except his scalp and legs. The baby’s chin was fused to his chest and his eyes were also fused closed.

“[The baby] was just red. Bright red,” Maldonado, 25, told Today. “You could see all his veins, everything was exposed.”

Maldonado says that her whole pregnancy was normal, with no signs of complications until doctors noticed the baby wasn’t gaining weight and decided to induce the mum-of-three. Ja’bari was born weighing a tiny 1.3kg (3lbs) – a moment Maldonado remembers vividly.

“It was just completely silent,” she told News 4 San Antonio.

“You expect people to be happy after you have a baby and I had no idea until they put me in a room and explained what was going on. I was just confused [and] lost. I didn’t know what was going on [or] what was going to happen.”

Ja’bari now weighs 6.3 kgs at seven months old and is reportedly improving – thanks to skin graft surgery using skin that was grown in a lab – and is set to be sent home in August, as they lower his pain medication to prepare.

“They used 12 trays [of skin to graft his body],” Maldonado said.

Initially it was thought that Ja’bari had a rare skin condition called Aplasia Cutis, however he was then transferred to Texas children’s hospital in Houston for specialist team test further. The doctors there suggested he may have epidermolysis bullosa, a group of rare skin disorders that causes fragile skin that blisters, but Maldonado and her husband underwent genetic testing and found they were not carriers for the condition.

Maldonado says that “he’s doing completely better,” but she’s still concerned that doctors have been unable to get his eyes open after two surgeries.

“I want my baby to be able to see,” Maldonado wrote in a crowd funding page update on July 13.

“This isn’t fair.”