A baby shorter in length than a Barbie doll so tiny doctors at first had trouble finding instruments small enough to treat her is making steady progress surviving a premature birth in a west suburban hospital, officials said today.
Zoe Koz was born Jan. 6 at Edward Hospital, Naperville, to Tammy and Eric Koz of Plainfield. The child weighed only 10.8 ounces at birth. Hospital officials said she is one of the smallest babies in the world known to have survived this long, and the third-smallest on record in the U.S.
Tammy Koz has lupus, an auto-immune disease that may have caused her infant's placenta to develop improperly, doctors said. Zoe was delivered by Caesarean section in her mother's 27th week of pregnancy after doctors determined the baby no longer could survive without medical assistance.
Zoe could fit in the palm of one's hand when she was born, doctors and the child's parents said at a hospital news conference today.
"When a 10.8-ounce baby comes along, you're not even sure that the kind of equipment you use routinely on the tiniest babies is going to work in this situation," said Dr. Bob Covert, intensive care unit medical director at Edwards.
"That actually was our biggest concern at the time of birth and the days thereafter, if it was technologically feasible" to provide medical care to the child, Covert said.
Tammy Koz said, "I had put a Barbie inside her (bassinet) to take a picture just to get a comparison. We were measuring her size, and the Barbie is 11 inches and Zoe is at 10 (inches) now, so she's just an inch shorter than Barbie,"
Doctors said that if all continues to go well and the baby improves, she could go home in 3 to 5 months. At that point, she is expected to weigh 3 to 4 pounds.
"In terms of some of the long-term outcome issues like vision, we haven't tested those things yet," Covert said. "We won't be able to do that for some period of time. Some of the things about Zoe's outcome we're just not going to know for a while."
