ROSA Flaherty weighed 1lb 8oz when she was born almost four months premature. Her parents, Gazette journalists Charlie and Sean Flaherty, lived with her in Hammersmith Hospital for two-and-a-half months. Her father tells her story

"Is she alive?" were Charlie's first words when the doctors returned 30 minutes after taking her new-born daughter away.

Yes she is, she was told. The hospital was keeping her alive.

Rosa had a tube down her throat from a ventilator machine that was doing her breathing for her, a feeding tube into her umbilical cord, a heater above her to keep her warm and a plastic tent over her to keep her skin moist, probes to monitor her heart-rate, breathing, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure.

She was 696 grammes, or 1lbs 8oz, and not supposed to be here. For some reason Rosa had decided to leave a custom-built environment and enter a world where she could not breathe unaided and her resistance to infection was about the same as somebody with the HIV virus.

There is no easy way to approach the situation. You see a tiny child you are scared to touch. She looks like a skinny old man with wrinkly skin who would almost fit in the palm of your hand. You wonder who she is and where she came from to suddenly arrive in your life.

It is difficult to make an instant connection. Some parents in the unit talked about wondering whether to take the step of starting to love their babies because they might be so quickly taken away from them. This sounds a harsh way of thinking but Rosa's chances of survival were about 40 per cent and although I write this with her safe at home in Devizes, several of her contemporaries in the unit did not make it.

Now four months have passed we can reflect on how lucky we have been. Although we still take nothing for granted, Rosa is almost 5lbs and kicking about like any healthy newborn.

The first stroke of fortune was that Charlie was visiting a friend in London when labour started so Rosa was born at Hammersmith Hospital which is acknowledged to have one of the best neonatal units in the UK.

This isn't to say that Rosa would have been in greater peril if she had been born as planned in Swindon, which also has an excellent unit, but in the desperate confusion of the first days you hold on to anything you can. Hammersmith's superb reputation gave us a starting point of optimism which turned out to be, we believe, very important to Rosa's progress.

We knew none of this on Friday, June 16, when Charlie was complaining of stomach pains. It turned out she was in labour and the following afternoon she was taken by ambulance to Hammersmith where Rosa was born at 7.10pm.

We talked on the phone as I rushed to London and Charlie told me Rosa was beautiful and very long.

"She's got very long limbs. I think she's going to be an athlete," she said.

I will be eternally grateful Charlie saw Rosa first and introduced me to my daughter. Her delight in this new life obscured the wires, the tubes and the beeping alarms. The first time I saw Rosa her strange longness and beauty was all I noticed and I was positive she'd survive.

The second bit of luck was that Rosa, despite being almost four months early, had good lungs and was taken off the ventilator after one day, almost unheard progress for a baby her age.

Rosa's weight dropped to 580 grammes before she started gaining. Her stomach couldn't handle food so a line was inserted beside her ankle and pushed up through a vein to carry food to her heart. It is hard to comprehend what the doctors and nurses are doing to such a fragile creature: how have they the courage?

Three days in and we were encouraged to pick her up and hold her. Hammersmith encourages kangaroo care where parents hold their naked babies on their bare skin. It has been found to keep premature infants alive in countries without sophisticated equipment.

Once we were over the fear it became an integral part of her care and we were holding her for five or six hours a day. It is just as important for parents as babies. There are no questions of love once you have held your little girl.

It is easy to write this now but none of it was easy at the time and the tension leaves you stiff and exhausted.

In the almost three months we lived on the unit, Rosa needed 12 blood transfusions and had some bad periods, including an intestinal illness which put her life in danger. She went back on the ventilator, which seemed to make her the hospital's baby again and not ours, and lay still for more than a week.

She was being fed intravenously but her veins kept breaking until there were none left in her arms or legs and a drip had to be inserted in her scalp.

It was thought the surgeons may have to remove part of her stomach but Rosa slowly got better on her own. Much goes on in intensive care that cannot be explained by the best doctors in the world.

After two-and-a-half months Rosa was transferred to the Princess Margaret Hospital in Swindon. Her growth improved and the monitoring equipment disappeared. She was becoming more and more our baby.

We were allowed to room in and have Rosa with us which reduced the tremors of fear at taking her home. Then we took her for her first walk in a pram. We showed her trees and the sky and almost wept with the joy of it.

When it was time to go it was appropriate a nurse carried Rosa, who was now 4lbs, to the car. We owe the doctors and nurses more than we will ever be able to tell them.

Under unfathomable pressure they invest not only their working lives in these tiny babies but also their emotions. They are our heroes.

We remember them every day and will remember them for all our days.