A little girl who was born at just 23 weeks recently celebrated a big milestone: her first birthday.
Dali-Grey Woodgates from West Bridgford, UK, weighed just 1.2 pounds at birth — a size so small that doctors placed her inside a sandwich bag to help her stay warm, as her translucent skin was too fragile for fabric. Her first diaper was roughly the size of a ketchup packet.
Despite her very early start at life, Dali is now flourishing. “She’s 13 months old but she has a corrected age of nine months and she has no development concerns, she’s just smaller,” explained Dali’s mom, Bryony. “She’s a little angel. She sleeps like a dream, eats well, she’s just a really happy baby, she is just so chilled. She never really grumbles or fusses.”
Bryony also noted that Dali is doing everything expected of babies her age. “She’s nearly crawling. She does all the things a nine-month-old baby should be doing. She’s amazing. To look at her you’d never known she’d been through all of that,” she said.
While Dali is a healthy, happy little girl, doctors led Bryony and her husband Mike to assume the worst, telling the couple that if the newborn survived her early arrival, she would likely be severely disabled and require constant care. In fact, when Bryony started showing signs of early labor in January 2022, doctors suggested she abort the pregnancy. Bryony and Mike refused, and four days later their daughter was born.
“There must have been at least ten people in the room, they were all completely silent. It was a very grave situation, not like the happy occasion, ‘congratulations she’s here,'” Bryony said of Dali’s birth.
“It was just silence and waiting to see if she was alive and what condition she was in,” said Bryony. “Then we heard the tiniest, tiniest little sound. It wasn’t even a cry, more of a tiny squeak. It was like a film. Everyone just went nuts and they were ‘she’s alive, she’s breathing, let’s get her on the ventilator’.”
Doctors initially gave Dali a three percent chance of survival, and she spent 169 days in the NICU, battling things like two brain hemorrhages, 30 blood transfusions, bowel surgery, and sepsis. She pulled through all of it and was able to head home with her family last June.
Now, as Dali has celebrated her first birthday, Bryony was quick to acknowledge that her daughter’s survival is nothing short of miraculous.
“I don’t think there’s an hour that goes past that I don’t look at her and think that she is a miracle,” she said. “In the truest sense of the word, she is just a miracle.”
