This moving story says a whole lot about how much power and energy we possess … and can share. It all began with a nurse’s common sense. She is the reason why many children are alive today and that she is perhaps the real heroine in all this.
This touching sibling story originally came to light about 20 years ago, but I can read it over and over again. Finding stories like this one proving just how powerful love can be is not easy.
When twins Kyrie and Brielle Jackson were born 12 weeks full ahead of their due date and their future was uncertain. Mom Heidi Jackson only carried her baby girls for six months before they were delivered at the NICU of a hospital in Westminster, Massachusetts, on October 17, 1995.
The babies were put straight into intensive care in separate incubators to avoid the risk of cross-infection. This was the standard procedure back then and had been for a long time. Kyrie was making good progress and gained weight, but the smaller twin Brielle failed to gain weight at the same rate as her sister. A month after her birth, Brielle weighed only two pounds, and her oxygen levels were low.
On November 12, her health took a turn for the worse. She went into a critical condition – her medical team was quick to respond but nothing was working.
With her stick-thin arms, Brielle was blue in the face from crying and was struggling with her heart rate nurse. Her parents watched the whole thing with fear and thought they would lose their precious baby.
But then a nurse, Gayle Kasparian, stepped in and decided to go against hospital protocol. She wanted to try a thing that was pretty common in Europe but unknown in the United States. It was really against hospital policy and rules, but Gayle was so heartbroken that she decided to give it a chance.
Kasparian put the smaller twin in with her sister, in the same incubator, and what happened next has been described as a “miracle.”
“When I put Brielle in with her sister, it was amazing,” Kasparian told local newspaper the Telegram. “She immediately calmed down. Her heart rate stabilized and her color changed.”
Within minutes, Brielle calmed down, and her oxygen levels got better. Then Kyrie wrapped her tiny arm around her little sister, and fortunately, a photographer was there and took a picture of the precious moment – a photo that would be iconic for years to come.
Since then, nurses have used the simple “double bedding” technique or a “rescuing hug” on other premature twins and triplets. Previously, premature siblings had been kept in separate incubators to reduce the risk of infection.
The girls stayed in the hospital for two months before they were discharged.
Telegram & Gazette photo editor Chris Christo captured the image of the twins with Kyrie’s stick-thin arm wrapped around her sick sister; little did he know that it would be shared around the world and be a pivotal moment in U.S. medicine.
The picture later spread like wildfire on the internet and has previously ended up on the cover of Life and Reader’s Digest. The media attention on parents Heidi and Paul Jackson became so great that at some point they changed their phone numbers. Absolutely everyone wanted to follow the twins’ development.
More than 20 years later and the identical twins, now women, are still very close. In an interview with Kyrie and Brielle, when they were teenagers, the girls said they often talk about the same subjects at the same time adding this extends to singing.
”Sometimes, we speak at the same time. Or one person is thinking like, ‘oh, are you thinking of a song? Yeah, the same exact part.’”
The girls said at the time that they are still fascinated with their stories and they still share hugs, staying close to each other through the hard and the happy times.
Since their story has touched a lot of hearts, it’s been shared many times over the years across social media. But unfortunately, every information out there isn’t correct. For example, some pictures of the grown-up twins aren’t actually Brielle and Kyrie. People maybe wanted to think it was Brielle and Kyrie, but Brielle went public in 2017 and asked people to be careful about what they share.
”To debunk it once and for all, the people pictured in this photo linked below is not Kyrie Jackson and I. We absolutely don’t mind you using our pictures for your stories, and I, personally, am honored that our story has touched so many lives. However, we would greatly appreciate it if the images used were accurate. The story is just as much of a part of who we are as anything else about us. We would appreciate if that could be respected. I don’t know how these two individuals started to come up in articles about us, or who they even are, but please stop using their image in your articles about our story. I’m making this post public in hopes that others on the web can see it. Thank you,” Brielle wrote on her Facebook page.
This image will continue to lift hearts for decades to come; it’s such a beautiful picture of sibling love and the power of love.
