Meet the wonder baby who survived despite the odds

New Delhi, March 19  As they say, ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’. Meet the wonder baby who survived despite the odds.

Fighting against all odds bravely, the baby girl survived 13 weeks of remaining in gestation in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to complete her 37 weeks to be discharged in a healthy condition with a weight of 1,740 grams. This is the first of its kind successful case in Gurugram’s C.K. Birla Hospital. Lack of amniotic fluid caused the emergency delivery.

Studies say that there are rare cases of a 24-week gestational baby’s survival without a disability. Only 5 per cent of such cases have healthy survival in India.

Born with an extremely low birth weight of 690 grams, the baby had a lot of struggles in her survival. Since her underdeveloped lungs were not able to help her breathe on her own, she was monitored on ventilator support throughout to avoid a condition known as apnea of prematurity, where a person forgets to breathe.

According to the WHO, India tops the list of 10 nations contributing 60 per cent of the world’s premature deliveries – 3.5 million babies, i.e. 24 per cent of the total live births are born before term gestation every year in India.

While WHO defines ‘preterm’ as any baby born before 37 weeks of completed gestation, in India, viability is defined beyond 28 weeks and the extremely premature babies (24-27 weeks) are not even counted by the statistics.

“This case gives hope to thousands of parents with high risk pregnancy and subsequent risk of prematurity as most of the times babies born before 26 weeks are not even given a chance to fight for their survival. Delivering a baby at a tertiary care hospital with fully equipped infrastructure and antenatal preparedness increase the chances of survival manifold,” said Dr Saurabh Khanna, neonatologist at the hospital.