Baby born with rare facial anomaly that left him without a nose

MOBILE, Ala., April 1 (UPI) -- A miracle baby was born in Alabama last week with a condition only 1 in some 197 million people have: He was born without a nose.

Everything went mostly as planned during Brandi McGlathery's second pregnancy, but when little Eli Thompson came into the world, she saw something she didn't expect.

"I pulled back and said, 'Something's wrong!' And the doctor said, 'No, he's perfectly fine.' Then I shouted, 'He doesn't have a nose!'" she told AL.com.

Eli was born with an extremely rare condition called complete congenital arhinia. McGlathery said he's "100 percent healthy," he just doesn't have a nose.

The doctor who delivered Eli, Dr. Craig Brown, later poured over all of McGlathery's ultrasounds and tests, but nothing was abnormal about the baby's development. McGlathery and her boyfriend, Troy Thompson, even remarked that their son had a cute nose because ultrasound imagery still picked up on the bone where his nose would be.

To help Eli with breathing, doctors performed a tracheotomy and kept him in the neonatal intensive care unit at USA Children's and Women's Hospital in Mobile for one month. He was finally able to go home this week.

McGlathery says the family has a lot of doctor's visits ahead of them. Eli will have to travel to Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston and Galveston to meet with craniofacial specialists every three to six months for checkups and tests until he's about 10 years old.

Though there are procedures that could be done to build a nose for Eli -- he still has sinus passages -- they have to wait until he's older.

"His palate didn't form all the way, so his brain is lower," she said. "It's a wait-and-see game."

He must also wait until after puberty because his condition affects his pituitary gland. Besides, Eli's parents want to wait until he's old enough to make the decision for himself.

"We think he's perfect the way he is," McGlathery said. "Until the day he wants to have a nose, we don't want to touch him. We have to take it day by day."

"He's an extremely happy baby and does cute stuff all the time," McGlathery told Good Morning America. "There's a reason aside from his health issue and not having a nose as to why we call him our miracle baby. He just tugs on people's heart strings. It's his demeanor."

The family set up a GoFundMe account to raise funds to pay for Eli's current and future medical expenses.