Born premature, baby girl grits her way to good health

She may as well be called the blessed baby.Born premature, on May 15 this year, she was as fragile as a glass.

Arriving good three months before the actual date of delivery, she weighed just 470 gm. Only a medical miracle could ensure she kept her date with destiny. With prayers on their lips, her hopeful parents awaited their newborn’s survival. And precisely that is what happened thanks to the unstinting attention and continuous care the girl child received from nurses and a team of specialists. 

Today, at a healthy two kg, but still not out of woods, she has braved all odds, thanks to the doctors at Manipal Hospitals, who described the achievement as a “phenomenal thing.”

Rushed from Meenakshi Nursing Home, where she was born premature, to Manipal Hospitals, the child wonder is a now a bubbly bundle of joy not only for the parents but also the medical fraternity who virtually achieved the impossible. 

Emboldened by their success, a proud Manipal Hospitals Neonatologist Dr Praveen Venkatgiri said that with premature children, it was important to ensure adequate oxygen, nutrition and warmth is maintained. “We are cautiously optimistic there will be no complications in the future. However, she will need to have regular heath check-ups and close monitoring till she turns two,” he added. 

The task was not an easy one to achieve. Given her immature lungs, she had difficulty breathing. So feathery was her baby skin that it was a challenge to maintain her body temperature at normal. Furthermore, the tiny tot was unable to tolerate milk fed through food pipe and intravenous infusion with high protein and fat solutions for a long time.

As Manipal Hospitals Neonatology Chairman & Head of Department, Dr Karthik Nagesh, explained securing venous lines to give intravenous nutrition was a challenge. Further complicating her nursing and nourishment was she suffered from life-threatening infection and low blood sugar, he added. 

Basking under a mother’s inexplicable joy that her baby lived to tell her tale, an emotive Nasreen Banu, 37, who has undergone abortions twice, effusively thanked Dr Rizwan and the Manipal Hospitals’ team for the “child meant a lot to me and timely intervention helped.” 

An average healthy newborn’s weight at birth is around 3,000 gm. Babies weighing less than 2,500 gm are termed low birth weight and those under 1,000 gm extremely low birth weight.