"[Kasparian] closed the door and Brielle snuggled up to Kyrie and she was just fine," said Jackson. "She calmed right down. It was immediate. It was absolutely immediate."
"[Kasparian] closed the door and Brielle snuggled up to Kyrie and she was just fine," said Jackson. "She calmed right down. It was immediate. It was absolutely immediate."
Brielle and Kyrie went home with their family just before Christmas, when they were only two months old. When they left the hospital, they each weighed well over five pounds and were considered healthy. "They're doing fantastic," Heidi said.
People learned about Brielle and Kyrie when a beautiful photograph of Kyrie's arm protectively around her sister, known as the "Rescuing Hug" picture, was published in Reader's Digest and Lifemagazine in 1996. People were deeply touched by the expression of love between the two tiny sisters and inspired by the healing that can happen with just the warmth of another person.
The conventional thinking of doctors at that time was that tiny preemies should be kept apart so infections couldn't spread. But experts now believe that the threat of infection is minimal, and the benefits of the comfort and security gained by the presence of the baby's twin far outweigh any risks.
"When you consider what these babies have already experienced,being thrust too early out of the soothing environment of the womb and into the noise, glare and physical discomfort of life in the hospital, you wonder what added stress is caused by being separated for the first time
from the comfort of the other baby," wrote Patricia Maxwell Malmstrom and Janet Poland in The Art of Parenting Twins. "There is considerable evidence that multiple infants who are co-bedded handle the stress of being hospitalized, and of all the procedures they must endure, better than those who are separated."
Successes in cases such as Brielle and Kyrie's have led to many more hospitals adopting the practice of co-bedding.
Children's Hospital in Columbia, Missouri, first began co-bedding in 1998 when the parents of twins Meagan and Jacob Breid asked that they be placed together. Medical staff at the hospital agreed after reading studies from other hospitals in this country and around the world.