How One ‘Miracle’ Baby Beat the Odds After Being Born at 25 Weeks
Kristy Cecil’s first pregnancy was uneventful, and her daughter, Francesca, was born without complications. Just one year later, Cecil was pregnant again and expected much the same — but instead she was diagnosed with a devastating medical condition that could have killed her and her baby. When her son, Hugo, was born at just 25 weeks — four months before his due date — doctors and nurses called him a “miracle” baby who survived against all the odds.
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Cecil never wavered from her belief that Hugo would pull through, even though he was just 1 pound and 14 ounces and had eerily transparent skin “like a baby bird.” “I believed that he was going to make it … and he did!” she says in an emotional and triumphant interview with Yahoo Parenting as part of our original video series, “What It’s Like.”
Still, she knows she and her husband, Ben Cecil, a racehorse trainer, were lucky. One of every nine infants in the U.S. is born before 37 weeks of pregnancy. And while survival rates have increased for babies born much earlier than that, like Hugo, pre-term deliveries tragically still account for a third of all infant deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Technically, a baby can survive if born after 24 weeks. That’s when Cecil, 41, a TV producer, began having contractions at 3 a.m. early one morning. While her husband, 47, stayed home with their toddler daughter, Cecil drove herself to the hospital near their Pasadena, Calif., home, where she was immediately put on strict bed rest. Hours later, she was diagnosed with complete placental abruption, a serious complication where the placenta — which provides oxygen and nutrients to the baby — detaches from a mother’s uterus. “A doctor told me, ‘You’re not going home any time soon,’” Kristy recalls, adding, “I began to kind of freak out.”
Even though placenta abruption can also lead to maternal death, she says, “At that point, I realized, it’s not about me. It’s about him, and I’m going to do whatever I can to help him, if I can.” Cecil was told that each day in the womb is equivalent to three fewer days that her baby would stay in the hospital — so she was tasked to “make it to week 25.”
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For a week, Cecil remained as still as possible in bed. Still, her baby’s heart rate dipped over and over. Then she got the news that she was dreading: A doctor declared, “We need him to come out.” He showed Cecil a scan, which revealed a blood clot that was causing her to bleed out. “It was so scary,” she says.
Cecil wept as she was wheeled into the operating room for an emergency C-section. She says there were troubles with administering anesthesia before the operation. “It had to happen so fast. I could feel everything. They got him out. I didn’t hear him cry. And I was in so much pain. And Ben saw him. And then they loaded me up with anesthesia, and then I was out,” Cecil says.
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Hugo was whisked away from his mother and put on a ventilator because his lungs were not fully developed. (A baby’s lungs don’t typically fully develop until 27 weeks in utero, or just before seven-months pregnant.) He was a mere 1 pound, 14 ounces and 13 inches long, says Cecil, noting that a “normal” baby averages 7 pounds and 21 inches long.
Even though Cecil was unable to hold her baby for a month after he was born, she was convinced he would survive. “I felt like he was going to make it,” she says. “I believed that he was going make it. And I felt like if I could be there every day with him, he would make it.”
Hugo spent four months and four days in the hospital and underwent five surgeries. “It was probably the worst roller coaster ride ever,” she says. “You’ve got two steps forward and three steps back. It’s never a constant progression of getting better. You always have new challenges to face.”
But she leaned on her family, hospital staff, and volunteers who tried to cheer her up with pizza nights, coffee breaks, and scrapbooking activities. She also developed enduring friendships with other parents going through the same situation.
Kristy Cecil (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
“It was really such a special feeling to know that we were all loved so much and taken care of,” says Cecil. “And I feel like, because we had all that support, all those people’s energies and prayers and love for him, I feel like, helped him get through it, too. I know it helped us.”
Eventually Hugo came home — but they weren’t totally out of the woods yet. He was on oxygen for a year, his heart rate was monitored, and there were feeding issues at first. Cecil would watch over him all night: “I would wake up, roll over, touch him, feel that he was breathing, go back to sleep.”
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She admits that it was hard to see the development gap between Hugo and other babies, but she tried not to worry about it. Once he began to hit milestones, even though they were delayed, she relaxed. “It got easier once he started crawling and doing all the things that babies do,” she says.
Today, at 5 years old, Hugo faces no lasting issues, health or otherwise. “Once he learned how to smile, he never stopped,” she says. “He is one seriously happy, friendly kid.”
Hugo Cecil, 5. (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
Anyone who meets Hugo now, she says, wouldn’t “have any idea of what his story was.” Though she, of course, knows all too well. “I feel like I’ve changed a lot as a person,” she admits about the nail-biting experience of not knowing whether her son would make it. “Having to just stand back and not be able to do anything about it, and let it be OK, was one of the things [I had to learn] because I was always just ‘I will do this, and I’m going do that.’” Now, she says she’s learned that “to not have control [can] ultimately be OK.”
To celebrate Hugo’s arduous journey and triumphant recovery, the family returns to the hospital on his birthday each year. “The doctors and the nurses say he is a miracle because of the nature of his birth at 25 weeks, and all the surgeries that he went through,” she says. “They’ve never said to me how bad it was, but I have a feeling that in their minds, it was a lot worse than they were ever leading on to me — just by the way that they react when they see him and are so shocked at how great he’s doing. And how lucky we are.”
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