Recalling the story of the birth of Ava and Anna, St. John, Ind.- resident Andrea Kulig describes the terror she felt when the doctors couldn’t stop her labor a mere 26 weeks into her pregnancy. With no previous health problems and a normal, healthy pregnancy, Kulig is baffled as to why her twins arrived in the wee hours of a January morning rather than closer to her April due date.

As she tells the story, both girls, along with their little brother, 22-month-old Trent, giggle, squeal and tumble across the furniture in the family’s St. John home. Hard to believe these two girls, who weighed in at 1 pound, 13 ounces and 1 pound, 14 ounces and each 13-1/4 inches long at birth, will celebrate their fifth birthday this coming Saturday.

Reflecting on the rough road that preceded the milestone, Kulig and her husband, Greg, marvel at the “little miracles” who, despite their uncertain and worrisome babyhood, have grown into two perfectly normal little girls who display nothing more than a slight speech delay as a consequence of their prematurity.

As she sat in her hospital bed two days after the births, unable to feed or cuddle her newborn daughters and reeling with worry about whether they would live or die or what disabilities they might have, Kulig was visited by a family acquaintance who introduced her to her daughter, also born at 26 weeks.

It was perhaps at this point that Kulig’s self-proclaimed pessimism began to take a turn, though ever so slight, as the months that followed were rocky. When she finally saw Ava and Anna for the first time the next afternoon, she cried, as she says she did daily for about the next two months.

“They were lifeless,” she says. “They were very opaque. Their skin, being that early, is just see-through, transparent.”

The doctors and nurses says it would be a long road but were confident everything would turn out fine. The biggest concerns, they says, were the risk of infection and underdeveloped lungs. Over the next 98 days, the babies fought through lung hemorrhages, a brain bleed and the enormity of their most important job – to take in nutrients and grow.

After their happy homecoming on Kulig’s due date of April 24, the three-month old babies, then weighing about 5-1/2 pounds, began their next journey, their days filled with medications, heart monitors and feedings from a tube in their nose rather than their mother’s breast. They battled severe gastroesophageal reflux. Later, Ava had to be fed from a tube surgically inserted directly into her stomach.

Thanks to Indiana First Steps, a federal program which provides early intervention to children from birth to three years old with developmental delays or who are developmentally at risk, an array of therapists visited the Kuligs every week for three years.

Kulig believes the various therapies provided by First Steps – physical, occupational, developmental, speech, nutritional – made the most significant contribution to the disability-free preschoolers they are today. Specifically, she believes the therapy spared her girls from having cerebral palsy.

“They would not – and we strongly believe this – they would not be as perfect as they are today if they did not get therapy,” she says.

She remembers, for example, how an occupational therapist would “mold” her daughters back into a fetal position daily while in the hospital, a critical part of giving them the muscle tone they hadn’t yet developed in-utero.

Today, Anna and Ava attend preschool through the Westlake program at Kolling Elementary School in St. John which is an extension of the First Steps program.

Kulig guesses they weigh around 30 pounds. Greg Kulig remarks about how Ava is the “artistic one” which a penchant for drawing and Anna is more drawn to sports. Changed by the experience and clearly more optimistic and appreciative of their gifts in life, the Kuligs hope to give Anna, Ava and Trent another sibling.They hope to convey the message as well, that their success story can be repeated for many families of premature babies.

The March of Dimes reports that the rate of premature birth has increased more than 30 percent since 1981. More than a half million babies are born prematurely every year in the U.S., the organization says, for reasons that doctors don’t fully understand.

“I want to give every parent hope that having a baby, really, at any gestation,” Kulig says, “that they could thrive and everything will be OK.”

Source: Erika Rose/The Northwest Indiana and Illinois Times