The Rescuing Hug: A Story about Twins and Human Connection

One nurse attendant there, Gayle Kasparian, started trying things: she hugged the baby; she gave her to Dad, who held her lovingly; she wrapped the baby in a blanket. It didn’t change Brielle’s condition. Then she thought of something that she had heard was done in Europe, co-bedding, and placed Brielle in her sister Kyrie’s incubator. The girls' father, Paul Jackson, says that as soon as the incubator door was closed, “Brielle snuggled up to Kyrie and she was just fine. She calmed right down. It was immediate. It was absolutely immediate” (Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 18 Nov. 1995). Brielle’s heart and breathing relaxed, and her blood-oxygen levels got higher, closer to where they should have been.

Then Brielle dozed off. And that’s when her sister Kyrie reached out to hug her. Brielle’s heart rate then stabilized, and when the twins went home right before Christmas, they were both healthy.

Kyrie and Brielle are twenty-five now, as close as ever, and healthy.

The event at the Medical Center of Central Massachusetts, captured by a photographer who happened to be on the scene, helped change neonatal care in the US. Nowadays it’s common practice for twins, triplets, and quads to be placed in the same bed, especially if they are born prematurely.

It also got many thinking some more about the power of hugs, the power of emotion, and the so-little-understood power of human connection.