Tiny Baby Born Weighing 9ozs Almost Ready To Go Home!

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Over the last 6 years we have featured a number of amazing babies who were born too soon but not many that were as tiny as Kenna Moore. Born at 24 weeks weighing a mere 9ozs(272 grams) and measuring just 9.6 inches, baby Kenna has more than defied the odds stacked against her from birth.

When mom Nicki Moore was just 23 weeks pregnant, doctors knew she wouldn’t make it full term. Just one week later baby Kenna arrived 16 weeks premature, but her chances didn’t look good.

“They gave her less than a 10 percent chance,” said Nicki after researching statistics on babies who were born at 24 weeks and very, very small.

And while not many hospitals would have given her a chance, the team at the Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte has made a family’s dream come true.

“Doctors are a lot of times bound by what they’ve seen and bound by science. And you know science says a lot of this isn’t possible,” said Nicki.

The first challenge was determining if they had equipment small enough to fit the tiny baby.

‘She was so small there was a chance that we may not have been able to put a breathing tube in her’, Kenna’s doctor told CBS Atlanta.

She also spent her first days and weeks being wrapped in plastic inside her incubator, something doctors do to keep the baby’s body temperature stable.

She had constant setbacks.

‘Her liver wasn’t functioning properly. She had way too much bilirubin and she needed constant blood transfusions because, of course, she wasn’t making her own blood,’ Nikki recalls.

But they weren’t willing to give up. Nikki and her husband Sam have visited the hospital every single day and they’ve heard a lot bad news until recently when doctors started talking about the future.

“Well let’s talk about Kenna going home. And I was like, ‘You said the H word! You said the H word!” said Nicki.

Now 3 pounds 8 ounces, Kenna is doing well and has been transferred to a level 2 nursery where she sleeps in her own crib instead of an incubator. She still requires oxygen to breathe, but she has definitely come a long way.

While they don’t have any way of predicting if she will have any medical complications Kenna might have later in life, all signs right now point to a relatively healthy baby girl.

Kenna is the newest member of a very elite club of tiny babies. She is one of the 4 smallest babies to survive in the world. In 2010 a German baby, only known as Tom-thumb, survived arriving at 275 grams and Oliviyanna Harbin-Page was the smallest we have ever covered weighing a mere 259gms.

We are eternally grateful to the doctors that give these little babies a fighting chance.