‘Miracle baby’ lives after getting mother’s touch (VIDEO)
SYDNEY, Australia – A mother’s touch may have saved her premature baby’s life.
“They just called him a miracle all the time. They all said they’d never heard of anything like this happening before,” Kate Ogg said.
In March, after three days of labor, Ogg had premature twins, a girl, Emily, and a boy, Jamie. Born at just 27 weeks, both babies were struggling to breathe and it looked like Jamie wasn’t going to make it.
“You can’t describe it, it was the worst feeling I have ever felt,” Ogg said.
Expecting the worst, the nurse laid Jamie on his mother’s warm, bare chest. Ogg and her husband David were struggling to say goodbye.
“I was just devastated, that’s probably the best way to describe it. It was just quite a shock for both of us,” David Ogg said.
As the couple cuddled the 2-pound baby, he started gasping. It was a reflex doctors told them to expect.
“Almost as soon as the last person left the room he startled, which was the first movement I felt of his arms and legs. I thought, ‘Oh my God what’s going on?’” Kate Ogg said.
In a video taken by a midwife, Jamie begins to slowly move, twisting, turning, even grasping his mother’s hand.
Many are left to question: How could a baby in such a critical condition, suddenly be so responsive?
“I think what’s important with the skin to skin contact, at least for the baby, is the warmth that the mother provides and the stimulation that the baby might have received from hearing the mother’s heart rate, so those are the things that may have helped the baby go down the path to living as opposed to the path of death,” Dr. Lisa Eiland with Weill Cornell Medical College said.
More often in the high-tech environment of a neonatal intensive care unit, doctors and nurses are embracing the power of human touch. It’s now so important to newborns, there’s even a name for it: kangaroo care.
“These infants are subjected to stressers: light, cold, procedures and the skin touch is really something that is beneficial to the family and to the babies,” Eiland said.
While they may never be able to fully understand what happened to Jamie, to the Ogg family, it doesn’t matter – he’s beaten the odds so far.
The Desk of Brian recommends:
Sydney schoolgirl, Madeleine Pulver leaves hospital after bomb hoax
Happy Mother’s Day!
6-year old boy commits sexual assault?
Sexy brunette, Jane Russell, dies at age 89
Virginia Ironside on BBC: Abortion is kindess as most children are “unfit”
Jay Leno Quotes (UPD: Obama visiting jobs & money joke)
Elizabeth Smart awoke when she felt a cold knife on her throat
‘Andy Griffith Show’ 50 years of influence
