A baby born unexpectedly at 25 weeks over 2,500 miles away from home is now thriving after a roller coaster journey over several months.
Claire Lutz, 36, was only 24 weeks pregnant when, on a business trip on the other side of the country, her waters unexpectedly broke.
“I’d stayed in the parking lot, and my husband and our friends went to actually look at the rocks — because I didn’t really want to do anything that was too strenuous”, Claire said.
As she waited in the car park of Vasquez Rocks Park in California, she was shocked to find that her waters had broken. Fortunately, her husband and friends were with her and able to provide help quickly.
“We didn’t have any reason to be concerned at that point. And you know, what we heard from the doctors was that there’s no way we could have known that this particular complication would have happened”.
The group found a nearby hospital and within 30 minutes, Claire was in one of the emergency rooms.
Baby Rocky was born seven days later by emergency Caesarean section
“I was in the hospital for a week”, Claire said, “which really helped a lot because I was able to get steroids and some other medications to kind of help prepare baby for potential early delivery. They didn’t know exactly when that would happen. They were hoping to keep me pregnant as long as possible”.
The couple’s baby son weighed only 1lb 4oz at birth. They named him Rocky after the Vasquez Rocks Park where Claire’s waters had originally broken.
While the hospital cared for Rocky, Claire and Alex rented a room in a house over the road from the hospital so that they could visit him daily.
“We got to spend time with Rocky, do skin-to-skin contact, and just keep track of his progress”, Claire said. “We knew he would probably be there at least until his due date — we knew we were looking at about three months. And there were a lot of ups and downs. Mostly it was wanting him to grow, to gain weight, for his lungs to develop — that’s really the biggest thing for him”.
“Sometimes it felt like it was two steps forward, one step back, but he had a really great medical team there every step of the way”, she added.
One of the nurses working in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) said “Babies born at 24 weeks — a lot of them don’t survive or they have major, major complications”.
“This little guy got through his whole hospital course. He did so amazing. Such a tiny percentage of babies do that well”.
Being discharged from hospital was not the end of the journey for Rocky
Travelling back from California to Philadelphia proved challenging for the family.
“Once he was ready to go home, he was still needing a small amount of oxygen”, the NICU nurse said, “but it was like, they (the family) couldn’t find an agency locally that would do it for them.”
Claire said “Because our insurance company is based in Pennsylvania, they had difficulty finding a medical device provider in California that would let us travel with the equipment.”
Ultimately the family had to rent oxygen equipment and travel on a commercial flight. The situation only became more complicated as their original flight was cancelled.
“The whole experience was incredibly stressful — one of the most stressful days of my life”, Claire said. “We went directly from the hospital to the airport, so it was the first time Rocky had been outside the NICU”.
“We were travelling with a cooler of frozen breast milk to bring home”, she added, “and we wanted to minimise the time in the airport to keep Rocky from being exposed to too many germs”.
Furthermore, on their flight home, Claire and Alex were concerned that the oxygen machine would run out of battery power.
“The batteries we were given were supposed to last six hours, and they lasted like four. We had two sets, so we weren’t sure. We were on the very end of the batteries during the flight. We weren’t sure if they were going to last the whole time.”
Fortunately, the family were able to make it to Philadelphia safely and were able to meet with their doctors to support Rocky closer to home.
Now Rocky is almost 15lbs, and his mother shares that he is smiling and laughing, and almost rolling over on his own.
“I feel like I learned that I have always been so astonished by how resilient and strong Rocky has been”, Claire said.
“When things were difficult for us, his resilience was a real source of strength and inspiration. Like, wow, he’s only a few months old — or at the time he was only a few days old, or a few weeks old — and he had gone through so much already.”
“Just seeing him still thriving and doing his best is really inspiring.”
Spokesperson for Right To Life UK, Catherine Robinson, said “What an incredible story of a premature baby and his family’s resilience through an early birth, months of hospital treatment, and an eventful cross-country flight! It is wonderful to hear that Rocky is thriving after such challenging circumstances”.
