World's tiniest baby, who weighed the same as an apple, leaves hospital

Weighing just 245g when she was born at 23 weeks, doctors thought baby Saybie wouldn’t live longer than one hour.

But five months on, she is healthy and leaving hospital with her parents.

Back in December, Saybie’s mother developed preeclampsia, a serious condition that causes high blood pressure, and was told that her baby would have to be delivered.

But as she was just over halfway through her pregnancy, doctors didn’t think her tiny baby would live.

Saybie weighed the same as an apple and was 7g lighter than the previous tiniest baby, who was born in Germany in 2015.

Her ranking as the world’s smallest baby ever to survive is according to the Tiniest Baby Registry maintained by the University of Iowa.

Dr Edward Bell, a professor of paediatrics at the University of Iowa, said Saybie had the lowest medically confirmed birth weight submitted to the registry.

But “we cannot rule out even smaller infants who have not been reported to the Registry,” he said in an email to The Associated Press.

In a video released by Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women & Newborns, in San Diego, California, where Saybie was born, her mum said the birth was the scariest day of her life.

Her father said doctors told him he would have about an hour with his daughter before she died.

‘I kept telling them she’s not going to survive, she’s only 23 weeks. But that hour turned into two hours, which turned into a day, which turned into a week,’ the mother said in the video.

Slowly Saybie gained weight in in the neonatal intensive care unit, where a pink sign sat by her crib that said ‘Tiny but Mighty’.

‘You could barely see her in the bed she was so tiny,’ nurse Emma Wiest said in the video.

Now, Saybie is well enough to leave hospital but she could experience vision and hearing problems, developmental issues and a host of other complications.

Nurses put a tiny graduation cap on her when she left the unit to celebrate her survival against the odds.

‘She’s a miracle, that’s for sure,’ said Kim Norby, another nurse featured in the video.

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