They said her twins are dying. Mom puts them in her lap and shocks everyone. Kate OG has an answer ready for the day. Her son Jamie asks who’s older, he or his twin sister. Technically your two, two minutes older, she’ll tell him, but Emily has been alive longer.
Shortly after Jamie and Emily were born prematurely at 27 weeks on March 25, 2010, doctors told Aug and her husband David that Jamie had died. Nurses placed his limp body across his mother’s bare chest so she could say goodbye. But after five minutes, Jamie began to move. The baby’s doctor told the odds his movements were reflexive and not a sign of life, but his mother continued cuddling him. Jamie opened his eyes.
Kate put some breast milk on her finger, and he eagerly accepted it. Their tiny baby grew stronger and stronger in his mother’s arms, and their final goodbye turned into a hello. I’d carry him inside of me for six months, not long enough, but I wanted to meet him and to hold him and for him to know us, Kate OG told Today’s Anne Curry in 2010. We 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. We feel so fortunate.
David OG told today. We’re the luckiest people in the world. Read the original story mom’s Hug revives baby pronounced Dead. The OGS experience garnered international media attention and dramatically highlighted the benefits of parents holding newborns skin to skin on their bare chests, which is commonly called kangaroo care. Though the medical benefits of skin to skin contact are well documented, it’s still not encouraged or even allowed at many hospitals.
Jamie and Emily are now nearly two and are doing great, Kate Ogg said in a Skype interview as she and her husband held the tow headed toddlers on their laps. In November, the family moved from Sydney, Australia, to a home with an ocean view in Nelson, New Zealand, a very chilled out town. She said the twins last check ups showed that they’re developing completely normally, she said. To demonstrate, she asked, Where’s your nose? Where are your ears?
And the twins pointed to the correct body parts. Where’s your belly? She asked, and the kids obediently lifted their shirts. Soon after the twins premature birth and Jaime’s revival, the OGS promised themselves they wouldn’t drive themselves crazy worrying about potential problems related to their children’s prematurity. They’d enjoy their babies and cross those bridges when they got to them, if there was a problem, Kate Ogg said, they figured we’ll find out about it eventually.
Still, OG and her husband think about Jamie’s brush with death all the time. Probably too much, she said. She panics if the twins sleep in and she doesn’t hear a sound from the nursery. I’m a bit too morbid, I think. Sharing their story publicly also led to some intended emotional consequences.
A Colorado woman told Jamie’s story caused distress in a support group for parents who have lost babies. The portrayal of our story almost suggested if you love your baby enough, you can bring it back to life. That’s one of the concerns we had about going public. Surprise their Little Sumo as the spotlight faded, the OGS returned to normal life as a happy family. And these days, they have a new blessing to count.
The big news lately in the OG family is that Jamie and Emily now have a little brother, Charlie, born April 27. Jamie and Emily were conceived via invitro fertilization, and the OGS had planned to try it again when the twins turned one. So Kate OG was pretty surprised when she learned she was already three months pregnant before the twins were even a year old. She hadn’t undergone any fertility treatments and figured her missed periods were due to breastfeeding. Jamie and Emily jamie and Emily charlie OG also tried to arrive extremely early at 20 weeks, but made it to term thanks to stitches to close his mother’s cervix and the hiring of an au pair to do the heavy lifting with the twins while mom was on bed rest.
Aug had gestational diabetes when pregnant with Charlie, who weighed more than £10 at birth, more than four times his brother’s and sister’s birth weight of just over £2 each. The three now wear the same size diaper, and Charlie can wear Jamie’s clothes. OG describes her youngest as a little sumo. She held him for three and a half hours after delivery. Just give him to me when he’s born, Aug instructed her doctor.
As a result of her experience with the twins, she says, I’m more confident in telling medical professionals what I want with my babies. The Science Behind Kangaroo Care While the OGS have been enjoying their three healthy children, the story of Jamie’s remarkable birth search behind kangaroo care. It’s not a miracle cure. Nurse researcher Susan Luddington pioneered kangaroo care in the United States, and she cautions, it does not resurrect the dead. Luddington, a professor of pediatric nursing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, speculates that Jamie might have had an ineffective heartbeat that was difficult to detect.
What she’d like to think happened, Levington says, is that skintoskin contact with his parents made him more alert. In 2005, she says, researchers identified a special set of nerves and babies that are exceedingly sensitive to pleasant human touch. Skin to skin contact with their mother’s release is oxytocin, the so called cuddle hormone, which affects multiple areas of newborn’s brains. Luddington says the hormone makes their heartbeat and breathing become more regular. Kangaroo care can also help minimize pain in preterm and full term babies.
Celeste Johnson, director of research at the McGill University School of Nursing in Montreal, has investigated its use in babies born as early as 28 weeks gestation in Johnston’s studies. Now all babies are held skin to skin with their mothers before undergoing a procedure such as a heelstick. I can’t do controlled groups with no skin to skin contact anymore, she says, because I don’t think it’s ethical. The length of time moms hold babies before procedures doesn’t seem to matter, says Johnston, who’s found even 15 minutes of skin to skin contact effectively minimizes pain. The evidence is really pretty overwhelming about how good it is for term and preterm babies, nursing researcher Diane Spat says of kangaroo care, which she prefers to call skin to skin.
It’s not like we need more research, but we have to get people to actually do it. Overcoming resistance despite the evidence that it works, the medical establishment has been slow to recommend skin to skin contact with newborns. Ignorance about the research findings and fear of handling premature babies are two of the main obstacles, says Lettington and Spatz, who works at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the United States. Our biggest reason is the physicians don’t know about it because it’s nursing genetic knowledge, Lettington says. The physicians want to see the data, but they don’t read any nursing journals.
Fear plays a role too, Spat says. I still see in most NICU’s that skin to skin contact is not a standard of care. NICU babies tend to be tiny and fragile and hooked up to tubes and machines, and both nurses and parents worry about trying to move them, she says. Her hospital has filmed an instructional video that’s used in NICU’s around the world, Stat says. It shows step by step how to transfer a critically ill baby from an incubator to the parents chest.
Practicing with a doll first helps eliminate the fear factor. It’s the thing the parents look forward to the most in their entire lives, Matt says. The first time they get to hold their baby skin to skin, everyone cries. The nurses are crying, the parents are crying. It’s so beautiful.
Up until that point, it’s like the nurse owns the baby, Spat says. Once you do skin to skin, the baby is yours. A mother’s physical and emotional presence provides babies with two things protection from stress and emotional regulation, both of which are important to healthy brain development and the child’s future well being. Newborn babies get passive immunity from their mothers through the placenta before they’re born. A mother shares the antibodies that she has with her unborn baby.
Each baby’s passive immunity is unique because each mother’s immune system is unique. Humans aren’t the only ones protective of their offspring, it’s noted in many other mammals. So to some degree instinctive to protect the young for most of existence. It was a very precarious survival for the first years, and it takes quite a bit of gestational time to produce one. Both factors that might account for mothers being protective.
Once started, it’s hard to give up. The child sees itself as growing, but the mother always remembers the baby she loved and protected. While generally humans and other animals flee or freeze when faced with an immediate threat, mothers stay put to protect their babies. And neuroscientists from Libson’s Champagneural Center have discovered the secret ingredient which makes mothers fight rather than flee. It’s the bonding or love hormone oxytocin.