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Little baby Francesca Bradley-Curran must have really had the hand of the Almighty on her head when she was born. This pint-sized miracle from Liverpool, UK, survived the challenge of life and death, after being born at just 24 weeks.
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Any baby born more than a couple of weeks before the 37 usual weeks of gestation can be termed as a premature baby. Usually, such babies are born with certain complications, and their survival rates are lower than those full-term babies. In fact, according to studies, 80% pre-term babies that are born after 26 weeks of gestation, do not survive after their first year. The same holds true for 90% of those babies that are born at 27 weeks or later. However, their lives can be extended by keeping them in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
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With such dire odds stacked against her, Francesca’s survival is truly nothing short of a miracle. When Francesca’s brave mother, Victoria Bradley, was pregnant with her, she had missed the timeline of getting an abortion done by a whisker and instead decided to have her precious princess.
Mini-baby Francesca was delivered through a Cesarean section and weighed just about one pound and six ounces, which is way lower than the standard weight of nearly two pounds and three ounces, which most premature babies are born with. Doctors had told Victoria that a matter of just 48 hours stood between the line that divides life and death for Francesca. Her tiny size had even the best doctors’ fear that Francesca, in all likelihood, would not be able to make it. Victoria was crestfallen and thought she’d had to bid adieu to her little angel, and therefore, took her darling daughter’s footprints as a keepsake to remember her.
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Little Francesca’s miniature feet were only the size of a penny when she was born. Victoria said recalling that difficult moment when she thought she would have to give her baby up to the Grim Reaper, “After Francesca was born nurses actually gave me a memory box, which they do for babies that die at birth. They took prints of her hands and feet for me.”
Victoria took the picture of the footprints of her daughter and placed them next to a penny to marvel at how tiny she really was. When she finally got to see her daughter, three and a half hours after she was born, she thought that little Francesca “looked like a 3D scan.”
But Francesca wasn’t about to go anywhere. She was determined to stay with her mommy despite the odds and fought with all the might her little body could muster. She spent the large part of two months in an incubator, surviving and proving everyone wrong. And as all miraculous stories end on a happy note, little Francesca was healthy enough after four months to be taken home by her proud parents.
Now Victoria is more than glad at her decision to have her baby right at that precise moment. “It’s scary to think if she had been just two days earlier they wouldn’t have worked to save her”, she said.
While Francesca was fighting her battle, she had to defeat multiple enemies including a collapsed lung, meningitis, and sepsis to emerge victorious.
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Now all is well and good at the Bradley’s home and Francesca just keeps growing and getting stronger every day. Victoria says, “She just kept getting stronger each day, then something else would happen. I didn’t think she would be here.”
Victoria has got a tattoo of her baby’s penny-sized feet on her wrist to remind herself of the battles her daughter had to fight.
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