0.7 kg ‘miracle’ preemie is born on a cruise ship and survives

Under normal circumstances, the odds of survival for a baby born at 23 weeks are slim: Around 30 percent, according to some doctors. Just 15 percent, say others.
But under the circumstances in which Haiden Morgan was born on a cruise ship more than 100 miles from land, with no obstetrician, no incubator and 14 hours to reach the nearest hospital? He had practically no chance.

“The doctors really tell us that he’s a miracle baby,” Haiden’s mother, Emily Morgan of Ogden, Utah, told The Washington Post. “It’s a miracle he’s here.”

She hadn’t expected to need a miracle when she, her husband and their 3-year-old daughter boarded a Royal Caribbean 7 day cruise in August. She was only five months pregnant at the time, and her doctor had approved the trip.
But on her second night at sea, amid motion of the waves and the hum of ship machinery, the contractions started but she thought it would go away. However, after 4 hours she started to bleed.

They called down to the medical unit, and Emily Morgan was brought over in a wheelchair.

“I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t really comprehend how wrong. I didn’t think about what the possibilities were. All I knew was I was going to have a baby,” she said.

She said: “I was naive. I didn’t understand what was going to happen from there. … I didn’t realize that there were going to be complications, and there were going to be problems, and we were a long way out at sea. All of that unfolded as we went along.”

In the medical center, a nurse assessed Emily Morgan, who called  the ship Doctor who confirmed she was in labour and the doctor warned her that the ship’s medical unit was ill-equipped to deliver such a severely premature infant. And Puerto Rico, the nearest land, was a long way off yet.

‘Don’t push, don’t do anything,’ they told me,” she recalled. “And I said, ‘I can tell these are contractions. I’m going to have this baby. I have to push.’ ”

Less than an hour later, at 1:56 a.m. on Sept. 1st, her son was born.
Immediately, the preemie baby was whisked away by a doctor. Emily Morgan, who still had to deliver the placenta, was in some danger herself. The ship-board medical unit didn’t even have clamps to cut her umbilical cord. She had lost a great deal of blood.

“I remember I told them, ‘I want to see my son,’ ” she said. The doctor and nurses soothed her, told her they needed to focus on her for now. At one point, a doctor told her that she had miscarried.

“I want to see him, I don’t care if he’s dead,” she recalls pleading. Then she turned to her husband: “I’m not having any more kids,” she t