Australian Parents’ Touch Revives Lifeless Newborn
Summary
An Australian couple knows the power of a parent’s touch. After one of their twin newborns was pronounced dead, the pair embraced their son’s lifeless body, talking to him and calling his name. After two hours, he opened his eyes and began breathing.
David and Kate Ogg believe in miracles. A few months ago, the couple from Sydney, Australia welcomed a twin boy and girl prematurely at 27 weeks. While their little girl, Emily, was delivered safe and sound, the boy, Jamie, had severe complications. He had died immediately after coming into this world. Physicians tried for 20 minutes, but could not resuscitate him. Jamie was pronounced dead.
The infant son was brought to his mom and dad. They embraced and stroked his little body, while repeating his name. They expressed the things they hoped to do with him throughout his lifetime. After two hours, he miraculously opened his eyes, moved his head around and began to breath. He held out his hand and grabbed his mother’s finger. Jamie was full of life.
“I wanted to meet him and to hold him and for him to know us,” Kate explained to TODAY’s Ann Curry. “If he was on his way out of the world, we wanted for him to know who his parents were and to know that we loved him before he died.”
Apparently, the baby’s heart and lungs were not operating if the doctor perceived him as lifeless. But then there’s his brain stem that acted out the fight-flight-freeze response. The baby’s brain froze as a response to the trauma of birth. It was unprepared for life outside of his mother’s womb, thinking it was in extreme danger. The brain shut down the body, minimizing the respiratory system’s activities in preparation for attack.
In Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy, Dean Ornish, M.D., writes, “I am not aware of any other factor in medicine that has a greater impact on our survival than the healing power of love and intimacy. Not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery.”
Some experts believe that the “skin-to-skin” approach, utilizing the warmth of his mother’s body, acted like an incubator for Jamie, keeping him warm and stimulated. Newborns instinctively recognize their mothers.
“They come out of you and all of a sudden there isn’t the warmth or the smell of their mother or the sound of her heartbeat and so putting him back on my chest was as close as he could have been to being inside of me where he was last safe,” the new mother said.