A Tennessee family has an extra special reason to celebrate this Christmas. After 10 months, their premature baby girl was deemed well enough to leave the hospital.
On Friday, Christy and Daniel Keaton, of Memphis, took their daughter, Nora, home for the first time, FOX 13 Memphis reports.
“I’m so excited. This is her first holiday home. She’s missed all the holidays in 2022,” her mother told the news outlet.
Nora was born 10 months ago at 25 weeks of pregnancy as a result of problems with her placenta. She weighed only 1 pound, 13 ounces, and spent time on a ventilator because her lungs were so underdeveloped, according to the report.
For a while, Christy Keaton said they feared for their daughter’s life.
“You don’t really know if your baby is going to live or not at that point, so it’s just scary,” she said.
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But doctors and nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit at Regional One Health kept encouraging and supporting the family through their long journey.
Dr. Chad Pinkard, one of Nora’s doctors, said more premature babies like her are surviving and thriving nowadays, and he makes an effort to reassure and comfort parents of premature babies in their care.
“I think it’s better that we let them know up front that it’s going to be kind of tough at times but that they’ve got a whole group of support system that’s going to be there for them,” Pinkard told the local news.
He said the youngest premature babies at the hospital were born at 22 weeks.
Modern medical advances are enabling younger and smaller premature babies to survive and thrive. The smallest recorded surviving baby weighed less than 9 ounces at birth in California. The earliest known premature baby to survive outside the womb was born at 21 weeks and four days of pregnancy. In 2017, the journal Pediatrics highlighted the girl’s survival story.
Recent studies out of Duke University and the New England Journal of Medicine have found that a growing percent of premature infants are surviving as early as 22 weeks of pregnancy. The research recently prompted the British Association of Medicine to issue new guidelines encouraging medical treatment for babies born at just 22 weeks of pregnancy. Previously, the guidelines did not recommend treatment until 24 weeks.
