World’s tiniest baby returns home healthy after 13 months

Singapore: A baby who was thought to be the tiniest at birth has been discharged from a hospital after spending 13 months there. Kwek Yu Xuan weighed just 212 grams when she was born at Singapore’s National University Hospital (NUH) on June 9 last year. The BBC reports that she was delivered at just 25 weeks, making her four months premature. Her length at birth was just 24 cm.

Kwek Yu Xuan was so small that the nurse on duty couldn’t believe her eyes when she was brought into the neonatal intensive care unit. ‘I was shocked so I spoke to the professor (in the same department) and asked if he could believe it,’ Zhang Suhe, the NUH nurse, told The Strait Times. ‘In my 22 years of being a nurse, I haven’t seen such a small newborn baby.’ Kwek Yu Xuan underwent 13 months of intensive treatment at the hospital, spending weeks on a ventilator, and now weighs 6.3 kg, a much healthier weight. Last month, she was discharged from the hospital, and is believed to be the world’s tiniest baby to survive a premature birth.

For the first time, doctors involved in her birth spoke to reporters this weekend and said that Kwek Yu Xuan weighed less at birth than they expected. ‘We expected her to weigh 400, 500 or 600 grams, but she came up to just 212 grams,’ said Dr. Ng, a senior consultant at NUH’s department of neonatology. Treatment for the premature baby presented another set of challenges, as well: her skin was so fragile that doctors couldn’t put probes on her, her body was so small that doctors had to find the smallest breathing tubes, and her caretakers had to cut diapers to fit her. ‘She was so small that even the calculation for the medication had to be down to the decimal points,’ a doctor said.

‘Against the odds, with health complications present at birth, she has inspired people around her with her perseverance and growth, which makes her an extraordinary ‘Covid-19′ baby – a ray of hope amid turmoil,’ said the hospital in a statement.

Yu Xuan’s parents have been trained to use medical equipment so that she can continue receiving care at home after she leaves the hospital.

According to the Tiniest Babies Registry at the University of Iowa, the previous record for the lightest baby was held by a baby girl born in the United States in 2018 who weighed 245.