2022/2023
Collection 18

The Miracle

1949; St. Louis, Missouri, USA

A baby born before twenty-eight weeks(1) in 1949 was not likely to survive. Born at week twenty-three, my grandpa and his twin brother made it with the help of diligent and skilled doctors and nurses. If the doctors and nurses had not been there, I probably would not be here.

Right after my grandpa and his twin were born at St. Mary’s Hospital, the doctors rushed them down the street to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital. The doctors got them there so fast that they were practically flying! When they got to the hospital, doctors and nurses came to meet the two babies’ needs. The doctors hooked them up to wires and put them together in one incubator.(2) After that, the doctors started to run some tests.

When the doctors were done running the tests, they had some news. The babies would have to live in an incubator for five months, until they developed enough to survive outside the incubator. One thing that helped the babies grow was pure oxygen, which is highly flammable. All those months pure oxygen was accumulating in my grandpa’s eyes, but not in his twin brother’s eyes, because his brother’s eyes were not facing the oxygen pump.

The oxygen burnt my grandpa’s optic nerves and his retinas. A few years later, when my grandpa was a toddler, his blindness was discovered. Around that same time, news was coming out that babies born as premature as my grandpa were blind. Just imagine — if the doctors had not used pure oxygen, all of those kids would not have been blind.

But my grandpa did not let his blindness stop him from living a good life. My grandpa went to college at SEMO (Southeast Missouri State University) for a year. He stopped going to SEMO because he got married and had children. After that, he started going to junior colleges, which led him to going to Lindenwood University. At Lindenwood he majored in computer programming.

Because he couldn’t read books, the state provided him with a scanner that would read the books to him. The way my grandpa did this was interesting. He would take out the spine of the book he bought and put the page in front of the scanner, which would read the page to him. If my grandpa maintained good grades, the state would let him keep the scanner, but if not, the scanner would be taken away. My grandpa maintained good grades; he graduated from Lindenwood and got a job in Information Technology.

In the end it’s a miracle that my grandpa survived being born seventeen weeks early in 1949. Also, he did not let his blindness get in his way. He kept on trying in everything and is still living a good life.

Liam Heath; Missouri, USA

1. The time period given is the length of the mother’s pregnancy. Typically a human baby is born after a pregnancy of about forty weeks.

2. An incubator is a machine with an enclosed space where the environment (temperature, humidity, etc.) can be controlled. Incubators are often used to help meet the physical needs of babies who are born prematurely.

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