When Victoria LaBrie welcomed her daughter Hazel into the world in December 2024, she expected the same joy every new parent feels — waiting for the first smile, the first yawn, the first sleepy blink. But within moments of holding her baby, Victoria knew something was terribly wrong. Hazel’s eyes remained wide open, and her tiny face did not move.
That was the beginning of a journey no parent could ever prepare for. During pregnancy, doctors had already flagged concerns at the 20-week scan. “They thought her brain had fused together. It was actually suggested or more so, kind of like, here’s grief packets type of thing,” Victoria recalled. “What are you wanting to do? And it took a lot of testing to get to the point where we found out that that wasn’t the issue.”
For a while, the unusual images of Hazel during ultrasound — her eyes wide open — had seemed adorable. “Her eyes were wide open on an ultrasound and we would always just talk about how cute it was,” Victoria said. “Like, wow, who gets to see that? Not many people. But then it happened again. And it’s like, wow, that’s luck.”
But it wasn’t luck. After two weeks of medical testing following Hazel’s birth, including MRIs and EMGs, doctors confirmed that she had Moebius syndrome, a rare neurological condition that causes facial paralysis and prevents blinking, smiling, or other facial expressions. The disorder occurs when certain cranial nerves fail to develop properly in the womb and affects an estimated 2 to 20 babies per million births.
“As soon as they handed her to me and I saw her eyes opened, I knew something wasn’t right,” Victoria shared. Hazel’s diagnosis also revealed a more complex medical picture — she suffers from hydrocephalus, a dangerous buildup of fluid in the brain that has already required multiple surgeries.
The moment that shattered one dream also sparked another: a mother’s determination to turn pain into awareness.