By Lucia Binding, news reporter
A baby girl born in California weighing around the same as an apple is believed to be the world's tiniest surviving baby.
Sharp Mary Birch Hospital in San Diego revealed the birth of the girl on Wednesday and said she weighed just 8.6 ounces (245g) when she was born in December.
She was born 23 weeks and three days into her mother's 40-week pregnancy and doctors told her father after the birth that she just had one hour to live.
"But that hour turned into two hours, which turned into a day, which turned into a week," the mother said in a video released by Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women and Newborns.
More than five months have passed and she has gone home as a healthy infant weighing about five pounds (2kg).
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The hospital said that the baby's family gave permission to share her story but wished to stay anonymous. However, they allowed the girl to go by the name the nurses called her – "Saybie".
She was ranked as the world's smallest baby ever to survive according to the Tiniest Baby Registry maintained by the University of Iowa.
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Dr Edward Bell, a professor of paediatrics at the university, said Saybie had the lowest medically confirmed birth weight submitted to the registry.
However, he added that they "cannot rule out even smaller infants who have not been reported to the registry".
The hospital said the baby officially weighed seven grams less than the previous tiniest baby, who was born in Germany in 2015.
Her mother described the birth as the scariest day of her life after she was taken to the hospital feeling unwell.
She was told she had pre-eclampsia, a serious condition that causes skyrocketing blood pressure, and that the baby needed to be delivered immediately.
"I kept telling them she's not going to survive, she's only 23 weeks," she said in a video produced by the hospital.
Sky News
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