Watch the video below for the miracle journey of the baby.
Video credit: Sharp HealthCare
A baby girl who was born at 23 weeks and wasn’t given more than an hour to live beat all the odds to become the tiniest baby ever to survive. And she’s now ready to head home.
Saybie weighed in at 8.6 ounces or just 254 grams, about the weight of a juice box, when she was born at 23 weeks and 3 days. According to the official Tiniest Baby Registry at the University of Iowa, she became the smallest baby in the world to have survived birth.
After a five-month hospital stay at the Sharp Mary Birch Hospital in San Diego, California, Saybie finally “graduated” from the hospital’s NICU in mid-May. She goes home a healthy 5.6 pounds, the hospital announced on Wednesday.
Saybie’s mom who, along with the rest of the family, wish to remain anonymous, still posted a moving video on YouTube, saying: “It was the scariest day of my life.”
The mother experienced complications during her pregnancy and was rushed to the hospital where she was diagnosed with preeclampsia. This prompted the doctors to deliver Saybie immediately.
Saybie’s mother protested, “I kept telling them that she’s not going to survive, I’m only 23 weeks.” A normal pregnancy is supposed to last up to 40 weeks.
Courtney Akel, a nurse at Sharp Mary Birch NICU, said, “At 254 grams, there are reservations on survival.”
But the low odds didn’t stop Saybie’s parents and the nurses from fighting for her.
“They told my husband that he had about an hour with her and that she was going to pass away,” Saybie’s mother said. “But that hour turned into two hours, which turned into a day, which turned into a week.”
One nurse commented that Saybie weighed half what a normal 23-week baby would weigh.
“She’s a miracle, that’s for sure,” commented Kim Norby, another NICU nurse. And a fighter.
“We do everything we know how to do as well as we can, and after that, it’s really up to our babies,” said nurse Spring Bridges. “So some really have the strength to go through what they have to go through and grow outside the womb.”
“I just want her to know how strong she is,” said NICU nurse Emma Wiest. “I mean, if she can start off where she was and do as well as she can be, there’s nothing she can’t do.”
“She is the smallest baby,” Saybie’s mother said. “But she’s mine.”
Saybie’s trip home comes just two months following the world’s smallest baby boy also going home. The unnamed boy had been delivered via C-section last August in Tokyo, Japan. He weighed in at 268 grams (9.45 oz) because he failed to put on weight while in the womb.
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