The smallest baby ever born alive survived despite doctors’ prognosis, which gave him no more than an hour to live.
This little girl, born in December 2018 at the beginning of the sixth month of pregnancy, weighed 245 grams at birth. She was so small that she held in the hands of nursing staff.
“It was the scariest day of my life”
While the doctors had decided to perform an emergency caesarean section to avoid complications for the mother and the baby, they had warned the dad that the little one would unfortunately not survive beyond an hour. “But that hour became two hours, which became a day, which turned into a week”, says his mother in a video posted on Youtube by Sharp Mary Birch Hospital in San Diego. “It was the scariest day of my life. They had to deliver her really fast, and I kept telling them she wasn’t going to survive, she was only 23 weeks” and 3 days old.
As the establishment reminds us, a normal pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks and a fetus is considered viable from 24 weeks, even if the complications accompanying very premature babies can be very serious. The chances of survival for this little girl named Saybie in the video were therefore very small.
But she “has hardly experienced any of the problems generally associated with very premature infants, such as cerebral hemorrhages or lung and heart problems”, assures the hospital, which believes that she “is miraculous, that’s for sure”. After five months of hospital care, Saybie’s parents were finally able to bring their baby home.
As AFP points out, according to the register of the smallest babies in the world kept by the American University of Iowa, this young lady would be the smallest baby born alive in the world. The previous record was held by a child born in Germany in 2015, who weighed 7 grams more.
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