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PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF LORI NASSIF ISTOK.
Miracle Baby
NICU doctors save premature babies every day, but is one local doctor’ s connection to Pope Leo an actual miracle?
P
OPE LEO DECLARED THE FIRST MIRACLE of his papacy in July of 2025, and it happened right here in Rhode Island back in 2007. A doctor, after doing all he could medically to try to save a baby who had stopped breathing and had no heartbeat( at the former Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket), invoked the name of a Spanish priest in praying for the infant’ s survival. The tiny baby’ s heart inexplicably resumed beating. I was reading an article about this, when I realized, stunned, that I recognized the doctor’ s name. He was one of the attending doctors in the NICU at Women & Infants Hospital where our very premature son spent the first four months of his life.
Our son, William, was born nearly seventeen weeks early in May of 2005( about two years before the above-mentioned miracle took place). At his birth, our little micro preemie measured just twelve inches long and weighed a mere 1.7 pounds. One of the NICU nurses suggested we tell our friends to think about a package of ground beef when they had trouble imagining the size of our newborn baby. I’ d been having complications for several weeks before William was born— unexplained bleeding and cramping— and the doctors weren’ t sure why. I alternated between fearing the pregnancy was destined
to end in a miscarriage and assuring myself that everything would turn out fine.
Then came full-blown labor when I was just twenty-three-and-a-half weeks pregnant. By the time I reached the hospital, I was two centimeters dilated with contractions coming every two to three minutes. The emergency room doctors were able to temporarily stop the contractions by giving me magnesium. They also gave me steroids to help develop the baby’ s lungs. In forty-eight hours, they would have to wean me off the magnesium and see what happened. Best case scenario: the contractions would not return, and I would remain on bed rest until the baby was born, hopefully months from then. Worst case scenario: the contractions would return and the baby would be born right then, nearly seventeen weeks early.
In a conference call with my husband, who was in California on business, a ner-
32 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY I MAY 2026