Mom’s hug revives baby that was pronounced dead

Modern medicine often works wonders, but an Australian mom now knows firsthand the true miracle that can come from a mother’s touch.

Kate Ogg was told her newborn son Jamie had died after
efforts to resuscitate the premature infant had failed shortly after his birth. But when Kate was given the chance to say goodbye to the apparently lifeless baby, she and her husband, David, found they were instead saying hello to the newest member of their family.
Now 5 months old and healthy, baby Jamie and his twin sister, Emily, appeared on TODAY Friday with their proud parents, who told the amazing tale of what happened to them in a Sydney, Australia, hospital last March.
Loving embrace Kate Ogg told TODAY’s Ann Curry that she knew her babies were in danger when she gave birth just 27 weeks into her pregnancy. Daughter Emily survived the premature birth, but son Jamie languished — and after 20 minutes of trying to get him to breathe, doctors pronounced him dead.
After Kate was told Jamie didn’t make it, nurses placed the baby across Kate’s bare chest so Kate and David could reconcile themselves to his death.
“I wanted to meet him and to hold him and for him to know us,” Kate Ogg told Curry. “If he was on his way out of the world, we wanted for him to know who his parents were and to know that we loved him before he died.”
But a strange thing happened on their way to farewell. After five minutes, Jamie began displaying short, startled movements. As Kate and David looked on, his movements became more pronounced.
Still, the baby’s doctor told the parents any movements were purely reflex, and their son was not alive.
Kate and David nonetheless reveled in their son’s movements, even though they believed he was dead. “We’d resigned ourselves to the fact we were going to lose him; we were just trying to make the most of those last precious moments,” Kate said.
David Ogg told Curry the couple had hoped “for an extra minute or two” with their son, but it eventually extended more than two hours. But no one was more surprised than David and Kate when their seemingly dead son opened his eyes.
“We thought, ‘What a blessing, we get to see his eyes before he passes away,’ ” Kate said. “But they stayed open!”
At that point, the couple began to think their baby might not be dead after all. “I think half of us said [then], ‘What if he actually makes it?’ ” David said. “If he does, this would just be a miracle. The other half was saying, ‘No, he’s been declared dead, this is purely instinct.’ ”
‘Kangaroo care’ David and Kate were practicing what Australians call “kangaroo care.” Actually, it is widely practiced throughout the world, especially in poorer countries where incubators may not be available for premature babies. An infant is held skin-to-skin to their mother or father, generating heat for the newborn much like a baby kangaroo receives in its mother’s pouch.
Kate had heard of kangaroo care before. “[The baby] comes out of you, and all of a sudden there isn’t the warmth or smell of the mother or the sound of their heartbeat. And so putting him back on my chest was as close to him being inside me where he was safe.”