World's most premature baby turns 1, gets Guinness World Record. Who is Nash Keen?

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7 days ago

Nash Keen, who turned 1 in July, has already set a Guinness World Record. Keen was born at 21 weeks last year as the world's most premature baby. Let's take a closer look at how the infant overcame the odds to celebrate his first birthday read more
Nash Keen with his parents Mollie and Randall Keen at the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children's Hospital in Iowa City, Iowa. AP
Nash Keen is a miracle baby. Literally.
Keen just celebrated his first birthday in July.
Among the presents he received was the Guinness World Record for the being the world's most premature baby.
His mother Mollie Keen said, 'Nash is so full of personality. He's a happy baby.'
Here's what you need to know about Keen
How was he born?
Born in Iowa City last July, Keen was delivered at only 21 weeks of gestation.
That's a whopping 133 days earlier than the expected due date.
Weighing only 283 grams, Keen was the size of a bar of soap.
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He spent six months in the neonatal intensive care unit at the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children's Hospital before finally being allowed to go home in January with his parents, Mollie and Randall Keen, to Ankeny, Iowa.
Mollie said that her son slept through most nights since coming home.
'Being in the NICU as long as he was, you'd think that he would be, you know, more fragile and stuff. And he's not. He's a very determined, curious little boy, and he's just all smiles all the time,' she said on Wednesday.
A difficult delivery
Saving their baby, whom they affectionately dubbed 'Nash Potato', was extremely important for the parents.
Mollie and Randall had already lost their first child to miscarriage.
By then, Mollie had been diagnosed with a medical condition that made it difficult to carry a pregnancy to full term.
Mollie feared she and her husband might lose Nash too upon discovering at her 20-week prenatal checkup that her cervix was already two centimetres dilated.
Typically, doctors do not attempt life-saving interventions for infants born before 22 weeks of gestation.
This is because most born at such an early stage cannot survive.
However, Mollie learned that the neonatal team at Stead Family Children's Hospital was performing life-saving measures for babies born at 21 weeks of gestation.
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Although she went into labour days prior to this benchmark, medical intervention allowed her to postpone the birth until precisely 21 weeks.
Nash Keen is photographed at the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children's Hospital in Iowa City at two months. AP
The next month was fraught with medical scares as an entire team of doctors worked to keep Nash alive.
'One of the things I noticed about the medical team is that they were very calm,' she said. 'You never really saw them, like, get anxious or anything. And so we kind of just learned to, like, watch them. And if, you know, if the doctors and the nurses weren't freaking out, there was no reason for us to freak out.'
While Dr Malinda Schaefer, Nash's obstetrician, hailed his birth — which occurred just hours past the 21-week mark — as a breakthrough in maternal foetal medicine, she did not sugarcoat the dire prospects of his survival or the strong likelihood of serious medical complications to the Keens prior to his delivery.
'Ultimately, it is not me that lives with the outcomes of parents' decisions, so it is really important to me to have honest and open conversations with parents, so they feel fully informed to make the best decision for them and their family,' Schaefer said.
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How is Nash's health?
While Nash has experienced some complications and developmental delays common to those born extremely prematurely, his progress has been as good as medical science could hope for, his doctors say.
At just over a year old, Nash remains on oxygen to help him breathe and is fed solely through a feeding tube, although he's preparing to try pureed foods. He also has a minor heart defect, which his doctors believe will resolve itself as he gets older.
He's not yet crawling, but he is rolling over.
'He's learning how to stand on his two feet, which is awesome,' Mollie said. 'He's got a lot of strength in those legs.'
With inputs from agencies