The words came cold and clinical, delivered in a sterile room that smelled of antiseptic and fear. Your daughter will be severely disabled. Her twin didn’t make it, and she likely won’t either. If she does survive, her quality of life will be so compromised that termination might be the most compassionate option. The doctor’s voice was calm, practiced, as if he’d delivered this news a hundred times before. But for her, sitting in that chair, hands trembling on her belly, the world collapsed into a single impossible question: how do you say goodbye to a child you haven’t even met?
She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Something inside her — call it instinct, call it stubbornness, call it love that defied logic — refused to let go. She left that office with her decision made. She would carry this baby. She would fight for her. And whatever came next, they would face it together.
Her daughter was born at just 6.5 weeks premature, weighing barely anything, her tiny body purple from lack of oxygen. The nurses called her Apgar score a 2 — a number that meant she was barely alive. They whisked her away to the NICU, tubes and wires covering her fragile frame, machines breathing for her because her lungs couldn’t do it alone. She stopped breathing more than once. Each time, alarms shrieked, doctors rushed in, and her mother stood outside the glass, praying to anyone who would listen. Please. Just let her stay.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. Slowly, impossibly, that purple baby started to pink up. Started to breathe on her own. Started to fight with a ferocity no one expected. The doctors, the same ones who’d suggested she wouldn’t survive, began to use different words. Remarkable. Resilient. Miraculous. But her mother didn’t need their words. She saw it every day in her daughter’s eyes: determination. A refusal to quit.
Childhood was hard. Therapy sessions, doctor’s appointments, milestones that came slower than other kids’. There were moments of doubt, moments when the weight of it all felt crushing. But there were also moments of triumph. Her first word. Her first step. Her first time reading a full sentence without help. Each one felt like defying gravity. And through it all, that little girl kept going, kept working, kept proving that the limitations others placed on her were never hers to carry.
Now, twenty-four years later, she’s walking through the halls of CHOP Philadelphia — Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — not as a patient, but as a clinician. She’s completing her training to become an Occupational Therapist. The same type of professionals who once worked with her, who helped her learn to move and speak and function in a world that didn’t always accommodate her, are now her colleagues. She’s on the other side of the glass now, helping other kids fight their own impossible battles.
Her mother still calls her the purple princess. Not because of how she looked on that terrifying day in the NICU, but because she survived it. Because she took every label, every limitation, every dire prediction, and turned it into fuel. The doctors were wrong. Not about the challenges — those were real. But about what her daughter was capable of. They saw disability. Her mother saw possibility. And her daughter? She saw a future worth fighting for.
Now, when she works with her young patients, she understands their fear, their frustration, their exhaustion in a way most therapists can’t. She’s been there. She’s lived it. And when parents sit across from her, tears in their eyes, terrified of what the future holds, she tells them the truth: I was supposed to be severely disabled. I was supposed to have no quality of life. But I’m here. I made it. And your child can too.
She doesn’t sugarcoat the hard parts. She knows the road is long, that some days will feel impossible, that progress isn’t always linear. But she also knows something the doctors in that sterile room twenty-four years ago didn’t: that human beings are capable of extraordinary things when given a chance. That survival isn’t just about odds and statistics. It’s about love, about perseverance, about refusing to accept someone else’s version of your story.
The purple princess isn’t purple anymore. She’s strong, educated, compassionate, and whole. She’s living proof that the worst predictions don’t have to become reality. That the children we’re told to give up on are often the ones who surprise us most. And that sometimes, the most important thing a parent can do is simply believe — even when no one else does.