The world’s most premature twins recently celebrated their first birthday after being born 126 days early last March. In 2022, Toronto couple Shakina Rajendram and Kevin Nadarajah were shocked when Shakina went into labor at 21 weeks. Doctors had said there wasn’t much that could be done at the time to save the twins who were born prematurely.
The couple had previously lost another pregnancy, so the news devastated them. Doctors told them they couldn’t do anything besides allow the premature twins to pass away naturally. “We just felt like…this isn’t happening,” Kevin said. However, the miracle twins, Adiah and Adrial, defied all odds and are still alive and strong.
At the moment, the couple turned to God, praying for a miracle to save their babies, who were born four months prematurely. “I was talking to God overnight and just telling him, ‘we need a sign of hope that things are going to turn around,’” Kevin recalled. “We knew that if they were born even just a few minutes early it would be a matter of life and death,” Shakina said. Fox News reported on the circumstances of the premature labor:
While still in labor, Shakina was transferred and admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital, about an hour-and-a-half drive away, one day later at 21 weeks and six days. Miraculously, the twins were born just one hour after they turned 22 weeks gestation.
Both Adiah and Adrial weighed less than a pound each and were successfully resuscitated. Along the way, the children had several complications from brain bleeds, bowel perforations and lung disease from prematurity. Several near-death experiences terrified Shakina and Kevin and left their twins’ medical team uneasy.
“We had many difficult conversations with doctors… Doctors would come to us and say, ‘Maybe it’s time to withdraw medical care,'” Shakina said. “But we saw what doctors maybe didn’t see, which was our babies’ fighting spirit. We saw that the babies’ had a will to survive… They never gave up on themselves even though they had all these complications. They were pushing through,” Shakina said. “[It] reassured we as us parents had to fight for them [too]. Even though the odds were stacked against us, it felt like sometimes we were the only ones advocating for the babies to be given life-sustaining measures,” she continued.
The couple emphasized the role of God throughout the process, and they even had friends set up prayer meetings over Zoom to bless the babies. “We had a group that kept expanding,” Shakina said. “So every time we would receive difficult news or we would watch the babies almost die in front of our eyes, we would send out a really quick message saying, ‘Please pray’… We didn’t even have time to get into the details. And people would start praying right away. While they were praying we would see amazing things happen.”
God answered their prayers as Adia and Adrial are still alive today and hold the Guinness World Record for the world’s most premature and lightest surviving twins ever.
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