A premature birth typically comes with a large host of complications. The sooner a baby is born, the more difficult the beginning stages of their life can be. So when Cheri Price gave birth to her beautiful daughter Hailie Dillon at just 23 weeks and 6 days – a day short of the UK’s abortion limit, which is put in placed based on the odds of a baby’s survivability – she was understandably terrified.
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Weighing in at 1 lb 2 oz, little Hailie was so small and underdeveloped that her brain could be seen through the skin on her head. She was born with a collapsed lung, and for a frightening full seven minutes, didn’t take a single breath.
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Doctors at the James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough, England rushed to do everything they could to help her, placing her in an incubator.
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Meanwhile, Cheri Price wasn’t even able to hold her daughter for another 18 days, which passed by in agony and nervousness. According to Price, she didn’t even look like a baby, appearing more like an unborn foetus, when she was first born.
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The road to her birth hadn’t been easy, either, as she started having contractions so early that the hospital she went to wasn’t equipped to deal with it, and she had to make an 8-hour, 300-mile journey to another hospital by car.
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Then, after spending two weeks without going into labor, she went home – and her water broke two days later.
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Now, little Hailie Dillon is a year old, and Price, now 22, is endlessly grateful that she survived and pulled through the difficult first few weeks of her life. Hailie Dillon joins two older siblings and a loving family and is set to have a healthy life ahead!