The Iowa boy who was named by Guinness World Records as the world’s most premature baby has beat “impossible” odds to reach his first birthday.
Born at just 21 weeks gestation – a staggering 133 days early – Nash Keen is now all giggles, said his parents Randall and Mollie Keen.
In early 2024, just six months after suffering a miscarriage, the childless couple happily discovered Mollie was pregnant again.
“When we went to our doctor’s office for the 20-week scan, I had some concerns about how I was feeling so I asked them to look at me closer—which they normally don’t do at that appointment—and they found I was already two centimeters dilated.”
It was an expectant parent’s nightmare: Waiting in a hospital room for days surrounded by doctors and nurses, hoping their baby wouldn’t be born too early.
The couple learned that the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at University of Iowa Health Care’s Children’s Hospital had recently started performing lifesaving measures on babies born at 21 weeks gestation. If the baby could hold off until midnight on July 5, it had a chance.
Luckily, Mollie’s contractions subsided for two days. Then, on July 5, just hours after she surpassed the 21-week mark, Nash was delivered.
It was a moment described by Dr. Malinda Schaefer, a high-risk obstetrician, as being part of a new frontier in maternal fetal medicine.
“We want what is best for patients, so we really try to convey that we do not know what the outcomes will be for these extremely premature births. And it is important for parents to understand most survival rates are low, and if babies do survive, they have a very high risk of long-term complications, even at 22 weeks,” she says.
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The stars really aligned for Nash as the team was able to quickly provide medicine to support organ development and lower the risk of certain complications. He was also head down, which is better because it was similar to a full-term birth.
Thankfully, Dr. Schaefer recalled, “Nash just came out very easily.”
As Schaefer and others tended to Mollie, they handed off Nash to the NICU team. Although he weighed just 10 ounces—less than a can of soda (285 grams)—Nash was big enough for a breathing tube and the smallest equipment.
Still, Nash’s chance at surviving was technically nonexistent, because at the time no baby had ever been born so early and survived.
“We never want the parents to lose hope, but we have to be very honest with them,” says Patrick McNamara, MD, division director of neonatology. “I would have told his parents, ‘The chance is zero, but I hope I’m wrong and we will do everything we can to help him.’”
Stanford and McNamara both describe Nash as incredibly resilient and, as Stanford says, “he let us do what we needed to do to help him.”
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“Around the one-month mark, we all began to breathe a little easier,” Stanford says. “While we knew Nash still had a long journey ahead, that was the point when we started to feel more confident that he had a real chance of going home.”
As he began to grow, Nash underwent numerous echocardiograms for his heart and endless monitoring and medication—all with lots of love from his parents.
Nash’s resilience carried him through months of recovery—and after 189 days in the hospital, his parents finally got the all-clear to take him home in January 2025.
The care team recently resolved one of his ongoing health issues, chronic pulmonary hypertension. He also has a minor heart defect, but it should resolve itself as he gets older.
Now, his parents say Nash is growing and changing every day, just like any other baby.
Stanford’s goal for the boy is, by the time he’s 5 years old and goes to kindergarten, that no one will know that he was born so early.
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“I never lost hope for Nash,” Mollie says. “I want him to see his story as a source of strength.”
The family celebrated Nash’s first birthday on July 5, something that seemed nearly impossible a year ago. But, for the boy in Ankeny, Iowa, beating the odds is what he’s good at.
SEND HIM A BIRTHDAY WISH BY Sharing His Inspiring Story On Social Media…