BABY ANGELICA Owens opened her eyes. The light that Sharon Hackney Robinson saw in them changed everything.
"She's in there!'" Robinson said excitedly to Maria Trillana, a fellow nurse in the Infant Intensive Care Unit at Temple University Hospital, where Angel was fighting for her life. "She opened her eyes! I saw it! She's in there!"
Trillana peered at Angelica, nicknamed Angel, who'd been born two weeks earlier, at three months premature. She weighed just 1.1 pounds and was the length of a Bic pen. Her lungs were a mess, and she was swollen with fluids that her underdeveloped kidneys couldn't process.
The unit's medical team had urgently summoned Angel's parents, Loretta and Darryl Owens, to the IICU. It was the third time they'd done so. The first two times, Angel had rallied, but she was now crashing. Her weight had dropped below a pound. It was time to discuss the sad possibility of ending treatment.
Robinson and Trillana had cared for Angel during those first weeks and had fallen in love with the child and her parents (who had four older children, from previous marriages).
Loretta Owens was a bubbly secretary with the Philadelphia Police Department whose pregnancy had gone well until her 24th week, when she developed pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening complication. She delivered Angel via C-section and was still recovering from surgery and the condition's after-effects.
Darryl Owens was a U.S. Naval officer who began and ended his work days at the IICU, where he'd coo to his tiny, dark-haired daughter, who was too fragile to hold. The staff got used to seeing him striding purposefully toward Angel's incubator, turning heads in his crisp white uniform.
Angel's nurses were sad for the Owenses. But they were also realistic about the challenges premature babies face.
Most preemies made it. But "super preemies" like Angel, on the cusp of viability, faced huge odds. Excellent care alone couldn't save all of them. They also needed a fighting spirit to swing the odds their way. Experienced nurses like Robinson and Trillana were always thrilled when they saw it.
But Trillana, watching Angel struggle to breathe, worried that Robinson was seeing something that wasn't there, that her compassion for the Owenses had clouded her vision.
But Robinson knew what she had seen.
"C'mon, Angel, you've got to open your eyes again," Robinson begged the baby. "C'mon, baby, c'mon."
Angel opened her eyes. And Trillana saw a light - the kind that's absent in the flattened eyes of the dying.
"Oh my God, you're right!" she said. "She's in there!"
At the same time, Angel's parents were elsewhere in the hospital, praying with a minister.. Darryl Owens couldn't bear for his daughter to suffer any more. But Loretta Owens refused to sign papers permitting the hospital to remove their baby from life support. She just had a feeling.
The Owenses returned to the IICU, where the medical team had been huddling with Robinson and Trillana. The team approached the couple with cautious hope: They wanted to give Angel one more chance to rally.
So they administered more steroids, and Angel hung on that day. And then another. And then another. Until, at 1 month old, she was strong enough for her parents to hold her for the first time.
Loretta Owens was terrified as she cradled her baby to her chest, afraid that the weight of her own hand would crush Angel, or that she'd lose her in the blanket.
But she did fine, and Angel just got better, bigger and stronger.
Finally, almost four months after she was born, the Owenses were able to bring Angel home. It was Christmas Eve. Their baby's homecoming was the best gift they could've hoped for.
All of this occurred 18 years ago. The Owenses, Robinson and Trillana recounted the tale for me last Saturday at Science Leadership Academy, where Angel is now a senior headed to college in the fall to study mass communications at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, NC. They had gathered with Angel and a slew of relatives and friends for a party to celebrate the release of a book of poems Angel has self-published called "Unspoken Truth."
Owens had written it for her senior project and was selling copies for $15 - with all proceeds to be donated to Temple's Infant Intensive Care Unit. (Of Temple's 2900-plus births every year, more than 400 spend time in the IICU.)
Loretta Owens was collecting payments at a table by the front door, where a money box was overflowing with cash.
"I wanted to give back to Temple," said Angel. "Without my nurses, I wouldn't be here."
Staring at her, I couldn't square that this vivacious, beautiful, healthy young woman wearing a fancy white dress, strappy five-inch wedges, dangly earrings and her mama's killer smile had ever not brimmed with health. She flitted around the room, fussing over the refreshments, fiddling with the iPod's speaker volume, fretting that the snow and rain would deter guests from attending.
But no amount of precipitation could keep Robinson and Trillano away. They kept pulling in Angel for hugs, laughing in wonder.
"She was so tiny," said Robinson, who, with Trillano, had glammed up for the event. "And look at her now!"
Trillano had seen Angel a handful of times over the past 18 years, when Loretta Owens would bring Angel to Temple for checkups. But Robinson was never working on those days. It wasn't until this past February that Robinson finally reunited with the girl whose eyes told her, 18 years ago, that she wasn't going anywhere.
"It was very emotional," said Robinson. "I've worked at Temple for 35 years. I've taken care of thousands of babies. Angel is one of only three where I remember every detail of what happened. She was such a fighter. Her family was amazing. You don't forget people like that."
Angel cried when she reunited with Robinson in the IICU. She saw babies as tiny as she had been and finally got that she, too, had once been attached to tubes and wires, fighting like a tiger to stay here.
And she was moved by the determination of the staff to give the babies the same chance she had gotten.
"It was overwhelming," said Angel. "It's so strange to think of what my life was like yet I don't remember any of it."
What she does know is that God has plans for her. Her parents say so, too.
"He has to have plans for her, because they called us from the hospital three times to say she wasn't gonna make it," says Darryl Owens, who is now retired. "She probably shouldn't even be here."
But she is, thanks to two nurses who saw what Angel was trying to tell them, 18 years ago.
That makes them angels, too.
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