Cradling their daughters, Helen and Glen Johnson say they cannot believe that they now have the family they had always dreamed about.
The couple spent more than a decade trying to conceive using a variety of fertility treatments but suffered several miscarriages as Mrs Johnson suffers from a rare condition that meant her body attacked her pregnancy.
But after being prescribed a drug to alleviate her condition, she fell pregnant last year.
Born 12 weeks premature, weighing just 2 lb 1 oz each, Isabella and Francesca are now home after spending 90 days in hospital.
‘It’s still bizarre,’ said Mrs Johnson (44). ‘There is part of me that thinks “oh my God, they’re really mine and they’re really at home”.
For the first eight weeks I felt like someone was going to pinch me in the ribs and say: “Helen, it’s a dream”.
‘Even after the first cuddle and change of nappies it didn’t feel real.
‘It was too frightening to comprehend that they were actually my babies because of everything that we’ve been through.’
Mr Johnson, a 43-year-old manager at the Royal Bank of Canada, added: ‘It’s been a long, emotional rollercoaster. This was literally going to be our last throw of the dice.
‘Fortunately it worked and we got these two amazing daughters.’
In all, the couple underwent more than ten rounds of IVF.
In 2010 medics discovered that Mrs Johnson’s immune system, specifically a cell known as a natural killer cell, was attacking the foetus, believing it to be a foreign body.
She was given intravenous immunoglobulin treatment and last June the couple were given the ‘mind-blowing’ news that she was pregnant.
The twins were due on 21 February but following complications with the pregnancy, Mrs Johnson was airlifted to Southampton last November.
She spent a week resting on a ward before undergoing a caesarean at the Princess Anne Hospital.
The couple only had a ‘fleeting glance’ of their two daughters – whose arms were smaller than their mother’s thumb – before they were put in an incubator.
As it was believed that Mrs Johnson would go into premature labour, she had been given steroids during her pregnancy to help develop the twins’ lungs, although they still needed to spend some time on ventilators.
Describing how it had felt the first time he held his daughters, Mr Johnson said: ‘It was just an amazing feeling.
‘They were so tiny. You had to lean back and rest their weight on you rather than hold them as you didn’t want to hurt them.
‘They were so tiny and fragile.’
The couple thanked General Hospital consultant gynaecologist Neil MacLachlan, the Jersey Special Care Baby Unit and the Southampton neonatal team for the help they received.
Mali and Lili-Wen Williams
Mali and Lili-Wen Williams were born on 7 August last year when their mother Felicity Williams went into labour just 29 weeks into her pregnancy.
In the months that followed the twins spent many weeks in hospital in Portsmouth and Jersey’s Special Care Baby Unit and there were times when their parents did not know if they were going to make it.
But on Christmas Eve, the JEP reported that the twin girls, who were born 11 weeks prematurely, were doing well and had returned home to the family cottage in St Martin.
At the time, their mother thanked all those who had helped and supported the family during their ordeal and gave other parents of premature babies reassurance that there is hope.
‘Without all these people without Portsmouth, without Jersey SCBU, without our friends and family, it could have been a very different story,’ said Mrs Williams (25), who teaches maths and psychology at Jersey College for Girls.
Mackenzie and Cameron Glover
Parents Pam and Lee Glover said that their sons Mackenzie and Cameron were so tiny at birth in June 2012 that they could each have easily stood up in a pint glass.
Born in the UK weighing just 1 lb each, they were the second-youngest twin boys to survive in Britain.
Mrs Glover, who was born in Glasgow and is the States’ intranet manager, was having a normal pregnancy with twins being expected.
At 22 weeks she was given the go-ahead by a consultant to go on holiday to Morocco with her husband Lee.
However, she was shocked when two days into the holiday her waters broke and she was admitted into hospital. The low level of nursing care there caused them concern. Mr Glover had to fetch the drugs his wife needed from the nearest pharmacy and look after her, including feeding her and ensuring that the intravenous drugs being administered to her had not run out.
Hospital staff told them it was critical they were flown back to the UK as soon as possible.
Mrs Glover’s contractions started, and the hospital staff warned them that the babies were going to be born and there was nothing that could be done to save them.
The couple said that their travel insurers claimed that they could not find a plane with facilities on board to cope if the twins were born prematurely during the flight.
However, after pressure from Mr Glover and the couple’s family, the company arranged for Swiss Air to bring them back.
The twins were born at Princess Anne Maternity Hospital in Southampton on Father’s Day, Sunday 17 June, when Mrs Glover was just 23 weeks and three days pregnant.
Speaking to the JEP back in 2012, she said: ‘We saw them when they were about six hours old. It was very traumatic and frightening – their skin was transparent. We thought that the staff might be keeping them alive so that we could say goodbye.’
When they asked staff if there was any chance their tiny little boys would survive, they were told there was some hope, but to take it hour by hour.
The couple, who had not attended any antenatal classes, started to assist with the care of their sons from when they were four days old, but it was three weeks before they could cuddle them normally.
‘I cried when we held them for the first time – it was such an emotional moment for us,’ Mrs Glover said.
