Premature births: Baby born at 22 weeks survives against odds

A baby given less than a 10% chance of surviving when she was born at 22 weeks has beaten the odds and is thriving, her parents have said.

Imogen weighed 515g (1lb 1oz) when she was born at Swansea’s Singleton Hospital on 6 September.

Now, after 132 days in hospital, the six-month-old is back home in Bridgend.

Her mother Rachel Stonehouse, 28, said: “Imogen has gone through so much and more than we will ever go through in our lifetime and she smashed it.”

The world’s most premature surviving baby is thought to be Curtis Zy-Keith Means from the USA, born at 21 weeks and one day, 11 days earlier than Imogen.

Rachel initially went to Bridgend’s Princess of Wales Hospital, just days after the gender reveal party for Imogen, with a bleed before her waters broke and she and her partner Corey were taken by ambulance to Singleton Hospital.

“It was so scary,” she said.

“The pain was horrendous… I just went into survival mode for me and my baby and tried to just keep breathing through the pain.”

Imogen was delivered just minutes after arriving at the hospital and was immediately placed in a bag in an incubator to mimic the womb.

Rachel said seeing her new, tiny baby in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and taking in her extremely fragile and translucent image was “like an out-of-body experience”.

She said she remembered thinking: “This baby should be in my stomach but she’s not. This foetus is now my baby in front of me and I now have to trust all these people around me.”

Rachel and Corey were told their baby had a grade three bleed on the brain.