World’s smallest ever surviving baby goes home

The Sharp Mary Birch hospital for women and newborns in San Diego California has announced the happy news that a little girl named Saybie has become the smallest baby ever born to survive.

Born 23 weeks and three days into her mother’s pregnancy Saybie weighed just 245g, or the weight of a big apple, at birth and her father was told by doctors that he would have about an hour with his daughter before she passed away.

“But that hour turned into two hours which turned into a day, which turned into a week,” the mother said in a video released by the hospital.

Saybie was delivered via an emergency cesarean section in December after severe pregnancy complications that put her mother’s life at risk and now after almost five months at the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, she has been discharged home weighing a healthy 2.2kgs.

With a sign pinned to her crib, “tiny but mighty” Saybie has fought for life the entire time she has been at the hospital with nurses describing her as being “without a doubt, a miracle baby”.

Her weight made her roughly half that of a normal baby at 23 weeks and yet despite that she has gone home, the official smallest ever, with doctors giving her a clean bill of health.

“Every life is a miracle … those that defy the odds even more so,” Edward Bell, a professor of paediatrics at the University of Iowa who oversees the small baby Registry explained.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.