First Person: Miracle Baby

William with Lori on the day after he came home from the hospital in September 2005. Photography courtesy of Lori Nassif Istok

Pope 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.

William in the NICU in May 2005.

Lori doing “kangaroo care” with William.

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 nervous resident explained the risks and possible outcomes. Nothing the doctor said was particularly reassuring or hopeful. Babies born at fewer than twenty-four weeks’ gestation were not then considered “viable,” and to complicate things further, our baby was breech. If he even survived the delivery, something the doctor referred to as “unlikely,” chances are he would have major complications: a possible brain bleed, trouble with his lungs, vision problems or hearing loss … any number of horrible possibilities.

KJ, baby William and sister Anika in the NICU.

As it turned out, soon after I was weaned off the magnesium, labor resumed and William made his dramatic early arrival. He was a tenacious little guy from the start, unaware that his odds of survival as a white male born so prematurely back then were only about 22 percent. William defied the odds, surviving — and eventually even thriving. One of the NICU nurses insisted on taking photos of us with our shockingly
premature son, photos we thought we didn’t want. If the outcome was bad, it would make us so sad to look at the photos later. If the outcome was good, would we really want to look back and remember those stressful, uncertain first few hours and days after William was born? And despite several nurses telling us how “stinkin’ cute” our son was, he didn’t appear that way to us at the time. His skin was red and seemed to be stretched too tightly over his tiny body. His eyes were still fused shut, making it look as though he had no eyes at all. He was scarcely bigger than my husband’s outstretched hand, and he looked for all the world like a tiny burn victim.

In those early photos, my husband and I are smiling, leading friends to ask how we could appear so happy at such a scary time, and how we managed to remain optimistic during our son’s months in the NICU. To understand this, you have to understand that for us, this was the best possible outcome. As soon as the doctors weaned me off the magnesium and my contractions returned, I gave up on the notion of a full-term pregnancy and a “normal” delivery. Because we had been told how slim the chances were of our baby surviving, and because we had chosen, in one of the most difficult decisions of our lives, not to take any extraordinary measures, we truly believed that our baby would not make it through the delivery.

Team Will Power at the March for Babies in 2013.

William visiting the Women & Infants NICU on his fifteenth birthday (during COVID!) while posing with one of his two primary nurses, Nancy.

So when he did survive, somehow managing to breathe on his own for forty-eight hours before needing to be intubated, it was all better than we could have imagined. The worst hadn’t happened, so how could we be sad or depressed? The outcome was still far from certain, and we would have to take things one day at a time, but we found ourselves feeling positive most of the time, because we were lucky enough to have a baby who was either a miracle, a fighter, or a little bit of both.

The NICU attending for the month of June, who helped to guide us through our first full month in the NICU, was a doctor by the name of Juan Sánchez-
Esteban. I remember him as a soft-spoken man with a gentle, reassuring presence. One of the nurses told me he spent most of his time in the hospital lab doing research when it was not his month to be on duty as the attending neonatologist. Back then, the NICU babies were housed together in large rooms called bays rather than in individual rooms, one per family, as they are now. For the sake of privacy, families had to leave the NICU twice a day when the doctors were doing rounds, so our daily interactions were mainly with the nurses rather than the doctors.

But in the brief conversations we did have with Dr. Sánchez-Esteban, I can remember him telling us that little William was so much on his mind that he had dreamed about him and about when the right time would be to remove his breathing tube (our feisty preemie kept trying to remove it himself before he was quite ready). After waking from his dream about William, might the doctor have offered a quick prayer to a certain Spanish priest for our son’s survival?

KJ, Anika, William and Lori Istok in November 2025.

Lori and William at the March for Babies in Boston in 2024.

Our son spent nearly four months in the NICU, coming home exactly four days after his due date in September. A couple of years later, I was surprised to find myself face-to-face with Dr. Sánchez-Esteban in front of our daughter’s new school as I dropped her off for kindergarten. It turned out the doctor’s son was in the same class as our daughter (the little girl he likely had last seen when she was just three years old, sweetly singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to her baby brother in the NICU). The doctor recognized me as I walked in holding two-year-old William’s hand, and froze in his tracks, speechless. “You don’t understand,” he finally said, clearly moved. “I almost never see the babies after they leave the NICU.” Here was our miracle child, looking just like any other two-year-old you might encounter. If you didn’t know William had been born so early, you would never guess.

We occasionally ran into the doctor at school events, but lost touch when his son left to attend a different school, and heard no more about him until the recent news story about Pope Leo’s first miracle. I imagine Dr. Sánchez-Esteban would be thrilled to know that the tiny miracle baby who once occupied his dreams is now twenty years old and six feet tall, a college junior studying mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech. William is an outgoing young man with a great sense of humor who loves anything to do with cars, hiking, traveling, attending college football games and spending time with his many friends.

One of the NICU nurses told us she planned to remember our son’s name because she was sure she’d hear it in the news someday. Her feeling was that he must be destined for greatness, given his amazing start in life. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe he’s already achieved his purpose simply by reminding those around him not to give up — that so much can be accomplished when we just take it one day at a time and persevere, even when the odds are against us. Oh, and a little miracle never hurts, either.