Former Rare Staff
Aussies Kate and David Ogg had tried for three years to conceive.
Videos by Rare
When Kate was finally giving birth to twins (a boy and a girl), the atmosphere in the delivery room turned “quite strange,” she said.
The boy, Jamie, wouldn’t make it, doctors told her. So she held him close and asked her husband to get in the bed with her.
“I wanted as much body heat around this baby as possible,” she said in the video shared by Johnson & Johnson’s YouTube page. “I moved his ear to my heart…and cried and cried.”
They told him about all his twin sister, about the plans they had for him. And then he opened his eyes and, with his tiny fingers, he grabbed his father’s hand.
The birth process is a stressful and exhausting time for the baby. Unicef advises mothers to hold their child in skin-to-skin contact to help their baby ‘adapt to their new environment’.
It means their ‘heartbeat and breathing will be better controlled’ and there is a wealth of evidence that suggests babies held in skin-to-skin contact are less stressed by the birth process.
The video was made by Johnson & Johnson and has nearly 16 million views.
Around the time of the twins’ fifth birthdays, Jamie Ogg was a healthy, happy kid whose parents had just told him the incredible story of his survival. The family has established a charity to raise funds for other families with premature children.
This post was originally published on March 11, 2015. We’re sharing it again because it resonated with our readers and a story like this can’t be seen enough.
