While any baby's first birthday is a cause for celebration, this ceremony is an extra-special case: born 11 weeks ahead of schedule and weighing just two pounds, no one had expected the premature infant to survive.
On August 6th, a baby boy named Warwick celebrated his first birthday with a big cake, lots of toys, and plenty of fawning friends and relatives. But while any baby’s first birthday is a cause for celebration, this ceremony is an extra-special case: born to parents Leigh Dumighan and David Newcombe 11 weeks ahead of schedule and weighing just two pounds, no one had expected the premature infant to survive.
Warwick spent the first three weeks of his life in the NICU in Birmingham, England’s Heartland Hospital. He had a bleed in his brain, and a fungal infection in his heart. His doctors were almost positive that he wouldn’t survive without continuous life support. On the tiny chance that he did manage to live, they believed that he would be blind, deaf, quadriplegic, and severely brain damaged.
After making the agonizing decision to end their baby’s life support, Dumighan and Newcombe waited for their fragile infant son to pass away. But to everyone’s surprise, the newborn fought for his life all on his own.
During the eight days that Warwick’s parents waited with him, “he stopped breathing 18 times, the heart rate monitor went off and we prepared ourselves for the worst,” Dumighan told the Melbourne Herald Sun. “Warwick brought himself back to life, they didn’t even expect him to last one night - he had no drugs or treatment, nothing.”
A month after his birth, the couple was allowed to take their baby home; and two months later, Warwick’s pediatrician told them that he was completely out of harm’s way. Warwick has cereberal palsy, but he has no indication of the other conditions that his doctors had predicted for him. Today, he is a happy, healthy one-year-old.
Warwick’s parents, who had prepared themselves to say goodbye to him days after his birth, are amazed by their son’s dramatic progress. “What happened to Warwick is a pure miracle, it’s as simple as that,” said Dumighan.