Shortly after miscarrying her child at seven weeks gestation, Amy Basham received some unexpected good news — she had been carrying twins and was still pregnant with the second baby. But a premature birth meant the family still had a difficult journey ahead.
“I soon found out there was still one baby left inside me – I’d been carrying non-identical twins,” she told The U.S. Sun of her miscarriage.
Amy and her then-fiancé, Kurt, received another scare when they went in for an ultrasound at 22 weeks, and learned that their preborn daughter, Daisey, had a total bowel obstruction that was limiting her growth. Daisey would need surgery immediately after birth in order to survive.
“It was an awful shock and from then on I needed weekly monitoring and scans,” Amy explained. “Meanwhile the extreme [morning] sickness continued, even while my tummy swelled from excessive amniotic fluid (known as polyhydramnios) because it wasn’t being processed normally – which made my tummy enormous and rock hard, and left me feeling breathless and uncomfortable.”
While Amy planned to have a scheduled C-section at 37 weeks, Daisey couldn’t wait, as Amy went into premature labor at 35 weeks. Because the closest NICU hospital was full, Amy had to travel over two hours by ambulance to a hospital equipped to help little Daisey survive. When she got to the hospital, Daisey was delivered by emergency c-section.
“When I woke up, I was in a room, with a nurse. No Kurt, no crying baby. Nothing. I was told she was ‘okay’ and in NICU,” Amy recounted.
“I just about remember being pushed in a wheelchair to meet Daisey, when she was 12 hours old. There she was, this tiny little thing, just 3lbs 9oz, covered in wires, a tube up her nose, sucking out everything from her bowel that she couldn’t pass herself.”
Amy reported that little Daisey was smaller than an iPhone at birth. “You can’t envision what three pounds nine oz looks like when you’ve only ever seen seven-pound babies. She was the size of my iPhone pretty much. She could curl around one of the baby bottles,” she told Essex Live.
When she was just one day old, Daisey underwent surgery to remove her bowel obstruction. Thankfully, the surgery was successful, and she quickly got better after that. When she was just three weeks old, she was able to go home with her parents.
Amy and Kurt say that after the ordeal they went through during the pregnancy and Daisey’s premature birth, they are better able to appreciate the time they have with her now.
“The positives are that after going through time in a NICU, you don’t sweat the small stuff,” Amy said. “When Daisey wakes at night, we are grateful, knowing we didn’t get to see to her in the middle of the night for her first few weeks of life.”
