Listening to 15-month-old twins Jessica and Zoe Nugent gurgle away in the background, it would be easy to forget that these babies came into the world in dramatic fashion with only a 30% chance of survival.  On World Prematurity Day, Morning Ireland reporter Louise Byrne visited the girls and their parents Evelyn and Ronan to hear the at times harrowing tale of their premature birth and the worrying weeks both beforehand and afterwards.  Evelyn says:

"It was our 20 week scan.  Straight away, the midwife was concerned that fluid was imbalanced, that there was more around Jessica than there was round Zoe.  She got the consultant to have a look at us.  The minute he saw it he said, "It's severe TTTS, we need to get you in for surgery."

Twin to twin trasfusion syndrome is a disease of the placenta that can cause a donor twin to have a decreased blood volume and a recipient twin to become overloaded with blood.  Mere hours after hearing this potetially devastating news, Evelyn was taken into surgery for a highly risky in-utero procedure.  Dad Ronan descibes those worrying hours as the worst of his life.

"When they came out, all they could say was the surgery went as well as it could have gone.  Long night ahead, they said, first thing in the moring we'll do a scan on the babies.  All we're looking for is two heartbeats. "

Miraculously both girls survived, beating the 30% odds given to them by a longshot, however the family's worries didn't stop there.  There was a chance that the girls could have been brain damaged during the surgery and the impact wouldn't be known until after the birth.  Again the girls surprised everyone, arriving healthy at thirty-four weeks, weighing just under five pounds each.  Ronan says:

"The first time I saw them they were in incubators side by side with pipes coming out of everywhere.  It's not a pleasant sight really when you see it the first time.  They're hooked up to so many machines…  Every day they just got better and better and started putting on weight.  We thought it was going to be a much longer journey."  

The girls came home at thirty-five weeks and have been thriving ever since and their mother couldn't be happier with their progress.

"They're such good friends already, even 15 months in.  They're phenomonal.  They're just brillian babies."

Click here to listen to that report on Morning Ireland.