The parents of a newborn being celebrated as a miracle baby because her mother underwent back-to-back surgeries, before and after the infant's birth, returned home to Grande Prairie, Alta., on Saturday.

The baby's first name is Miracle, and her mom, 36-year-old Roxanne Follett, says it's fitting, given the events surrounding the birth last week at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton.

Roxanne Follett and husband Douglas hold newborn Miracle Astra Alice Alfreda Follett in the hospital as Roxanne's mother stands behind them.
(Canadian Press)

On  Jan. 24, doctors first delivered Follett's premature baby by caesarean section. Moments later, the new mother began eight hours of open-heart surgery to repair a dangerous tear in her aorta.

Follett spoke from a wheelchair Saturday, with tears in her eyes as she described how it was a special birth to begin with since she had gone through in-vitro fertilization just to get pregnant.

"She was special before," said the joyful mother about her newborn. "She was one of four embryos that survived, the rest didn't survive. So there was a reason. She saved my life and I saved her life."

"The fact that she was actually pregnant allowed us to pick this [heart condition] up a lot earlier and deal with it before we had a dire outcome," said her obstetrician, Dr. Billy Wong.

"I can't even express how every time I look at her … and my husband is so loving, and we got through this," Follett said. "I want everyone to know she's my miracle baby."

One of the baby's middle names is Astra, which means star, said Follett, a nurse in the medical rehabilitation unit of a Grande Prairie hospital.

Doctors said the baby, who would soon be joining her parents at home, was a miracle from the start. Her mother has a hormonal disorder called Addison's disease, requiring her to have in-vitro fertilization to conceive.

Then when she was 35 weeks pregnant, she began feeling chest pains and shortness of breath.

"I just knew something was wrong," she said. "I just knew it because I kept having this choking feeling."

Connected to a machine

To perform the heart surgery, doctors had to cool her body temperature and connect her to a heart-lung machine.

Doctors said they performed the caesarean section first because the baby would not have been able to survive under such conditions.

Both Roxanne and her 44-year-old husband, Douglas, said they know how lucky they are.

"I feel like I have won a million dollars," Douglas said. "But I didn't get the million dollars. I got two lives."

Wong said there have been 40 surgical cases of this type reported around the world over the last 25 years, but both the mother and baby survived in only 18 cases.