A premature baby born weighing just 1lb 3oz and still in her amniotic sac has defied the odds to reach her first birthday.
Miracle tot weighed the same as half a bag of sugar when she arrived 14 weeks early with her protective surround from the womb.
Doctors told parents Nicole McGowan and Anthony Robertson there was very little chance she would survive.
When she was born her skin was so thin you her organs were visible. Her eyes were still fused closed and the holes in her ears hadn’t formed yet.
The tot spent 118 days in three different hospitals as she battled to survive.
But a year later she is doing well, despite still having a hole in her heart and weighing half the normal weight of a youngster her age.
Nicole, 25, a part-time bar worker said: “Reaching her first birthday really is a miracle.
“She keeps beating the odds. She’s here, she’s healthy and cheeky.
“I think it was really hard for Anthony, at one point doctors were telling him neither Skyla and I would make it. He felt helpless.
“It was his first child so must have been even harder on him, but he put on such a brave face and managed to stay really calm.
“When we saw her in the incubator I couldn’t believe how small she was, I thought there was no way something so small and fragile could survive.
“But she just kept fighting, and I started to realise she was going to make it.
“She’s our tough wee cookie. It is hard though, every step forward we take there’s about five steps back when she catches an infection or something.”
Mum-of-two Nicole suffered from potentially lethal pre-eclampsia during her pregnancy and was scheduled in for a routine caesarean on April 5, 2015.
But after a scan the night before doctors told her and Anthony, 26, to expect the worst as the blood from Skyla’s cord had reversed, essentially starving her.
Nicole said: “They told me they had to do it straight away or she wouldn’t make it to midnight.
“I remember them telling me an option was to let her pass away in my tummy, that is the one thing that will never leave me.
“I told them they had to at least try, and thankfully she was born and managed to breathe on her own.
“I couldn’t see Skyla until seven hours after she was born.
“And it was one week after she was born before I could hold her or cuddle her, even then it was only for a couple of minutes at a time because her temperature would drop outside the incubator.”
Skyla, who had been due on July 8 last year, arrived 14 weeks early on April 4.
She needed a heart operation before Christmas and suffers from a condition which affects blood flow to the organ.
Skyla, from Johnstone, Renfrewshire, is performing to her ‘corrected’ age of nine-months-old.
She is almost crawling, teething, and has said her first words ‘hiya’, ‘dada’ and ‘ta’.
But she is still tiny, weighing just 9lb 11oz and wearing 0-3 month clothes.
And she will have to wait two years to find out if she requires open-heart surgery to fix the hole in her heart.
But Nicole and Anthony are hoping it will heal itself before this time, saving her from more surgery.
