I gave birth to my premature twins under blinding lights that made the delivery room feel less like a place of welcome and more like a battlefield I was already losing.
Everything happened too fast. Doctors shouted numbers. Nurses moved with terrifying urgency. Someone told me to breathe while my body shook uncontrollably. I didn’t even get to hold them. They were rushed away, wrapped in wires and tubes before I could memorize their faces.
My daughter was a fighter from the start. She was impossibly small, her skin translucent, but her chest rose steadily. Every update about her felt like a fragile promise.
“She’s responding well,” they said.
“She’s strong,” they said.
My son wasn’t.
His incubator was surrounded by machines that beeped and screamed in uneven rhythms, like a countdown I couldn’t stop. His skin darkened into a shade of purple that still haunts me. Every breath looked like a struggle he was losing. I stood there, useless, my hands pressed to the glass, sobbing so hard I could barely see him.
I leaned close, whispering his name, apologizing for everything I thought I’d done wrong. I tried to memorize every detail of his face—the curve of his lips, the way his tiny fingers twitched—because somewhere deep inside, I was convinced this was goodbye.
Then the doors slammed open.
A young nurse rushed in, breathless, eyes wide like she’d just remembered something vital. She couldn’t have been older than her mid-twenties. Without saying a single word, she moved straight to my son’s incubator.
“Wait—” someone started.
But she didn’t wait.
She disconnected him from the wires. The room froze. Doctors stared. Time seemed to stop. Before anyone could stop her, she carried my son across the room and placed him against his sister’s chest. Skin to skin. Two tiny bodies pressed together like they were meant to be.
I stopped breathing.
Seconds passed. Then something impossible happened.
His color began to change. Purple faded into pink. His chest rose—once, then again—steady, confident, alive. It was like his body suddenly remembered how to live.
Five years have passed since that night.
My twins are loud, healthy, chaotic forces of nature. They fight, they laugh, they run until the house shakes. And every time I watch my son breathe without effort, I think of that nurse.
She didn’t just save my child.
She saved the whole world I was about to lose.
