On March 25, 2010, Kate and David heard the words every parent dreads: Their newborn wasn't going to make it. Their twinsa girl and a boywere born two minutes apart and 14 weeks premature, weighing just over two pounds each. Doctors had tried to save the boy for 20 minutes but saw no improvement. His heartbeat was nearly gone, and he'd stopped breathing. The baby had just moments to live.
"I saw him gasp (喘息), but the doctor said it was no use," Kate told the Daily Mail five years later. "I know it sounds stupid, but if he was still gasping, that was a sign of life. I wasn't going to give up easily."
Still, the couple knew this was likely a goodbye. In an effort to cherish her last minutes with the tiny boy, Kate asked to hold him.
"I wanted to meet him, and for him to know us," Kate told Today. "We'd resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to lose him, and we were just trying to make the most of those last, precious moments."
Kate unwrapped the boy, whom the couple had already named Jamie, from his hospital blanket and asked David to take his shirt off and join them in bed. The first-time parents wanted their son to be as warm as possible and hoped the skin-to-skin contact would improve his condition. They also talked to him.
"We were trying to persuade him to stay," Kate told the Daily Mail. "We explained his name and that he had a twin that he had to look out for and how hard we had tried to have him."
Then something miraculous happened. Jamie gasped againand then he started breathing. Finally, he reached for his father's finger.
The couple's lost boy had made it.
"We're the luckiest people in the world," David told Today.
Eight years later, Jamie and his sister, Emily, are happy and healthy. The couple only recently told the kids the story of their birth. "Emily burst into tears," Kate said. "She was really upset, and she kept hugging Jamie. This whole experience makes you cherish them more."
