When doctors gave Vivian Hernandez’s unborn son only a 3% chance of survival, she said she stopped trying to control the outcome and placed it in God’s hands.
Months later, after 113 days in the NICU and countless moments of uncertainty, the baby once considered unlikely to survive finally came home — just in time for Mother’s Day.
The day Hernandez learned she was pregnant was Mother’s Day weekend.
After trying for some time to grow her family, the Colorado mother finally received the news she had hoped for: she was expecting a baby boy.
The pregnancy felt ordinary at first. Safe. Full of plans and quiet anticipation.
“It’s super cliché what they say, right?” Hernandez told 9News. “Once you stop trying, it’s when it happens, and yep, that’s exactly what happened.”
She could not have known that within months, joy would turn into fear — and that her son’s life would become a fight measured hour by hour.
At just 18 weeks pregnant, Hernandez’s membranes ruptured and her water broke.
The news from doctors was devastating.
“They had given me a 3% chance — they’re like, ‘He has a 3% chance of surviving, or even that you can even get to delivery would be 3%,’” Hernandez told 9News.
Three percent.
Not enough certainty to imagine bringing a baby home.
At 18 weeks, many parents are only beginning to picture nursery colors and baby names. Hernandez was suddenly facing the possibility of losing her son before ever holding him.
Doctors transferred her from a hospital in Greeley to HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke’s in Denver, where physicians worked to prolong the pregnancy. Still, there were no guarantees.
With medicine reaching its limits, Hernandez turned to something else entirely:
Faith.
“But my faith in God is so big and I, you know, I just literally surrendered it to God and I was like this is your will, not mine,” she told 9News.
It was not surrender born from giving up.
It was surrender born from love — the kind that keeps hoping when there is almost no reason left to hope.
Then came Sept. 11, 2025.
Her son, Sebastian Moncivais, arrived at 22 weeks and one day gestation, barely past what many hospitals consider the edge of viability. He weighed around 1 pound.
His father would later describe the size of his newborn son in a way no number could capture.
“He was as big as my hand,” Henry Moncivais told 9News.
A whole life.
Small enough to fit in a parent’s palm.
Sebastian entered the world surrounded not by lullabies or nursery decorations, but by machines, alarms, medications and tubes. He was placed on a ventilator for nearly two months and depended on intensive support to survive.
Even the doctors caring for him feared he would not make it.
“The first few weeks of his life, I was really not sure if he was going to survive. I really was not,” Dr. Jennifer Zank told 9News. “There were days that I would call his mom, Vivian, and say, ‘I’m not sure he’s going to survive today.’”
Not this week.
Not tomorrow.
Today.
For 113 days, Sebastian’s family lived inside uncertainty.
Every improvement brought hope.
Every setback threatened to take it away.
The milestones most families expect without thinking became victories worth celebrating:
Breathing without a machine.
Eating independently.
Growing stronger.
Staying alive another day.
Slowly, the baby once given almost no chance began rewriting his own story.
Sebastian came off the ventilator.
The wires lessened.
His tiny body learned to do what doctors once worried it never could.
And then, after 113 days in the NICU, something extraordinary happened.
He went home.
Not only home.
Home before his original due date.
Home days before Mother’s Day.
Home in time for his sister’s birthday.
His older sister, Raelynn, had waited months to meet the little brother she knew mostly through hospital updates and hope.
“We just didn’t know if she was ever going to be able to meet him face to face, and when we were to bring him home, we actually brought him home a couple days before her birthday,” Hernandez told 9News.
For Raelynn, there had only been one wish.
“That was the only thing she wanted for her birthday, was to meet her baby brother, and we were able to do that,” Hernandez said. “And just that memory is the core memory that sits with me — my two kids in the same room, in the same house. It was amazing.”
After months spent wondering whether Sebastian would survive another night, the family finally shared something ordinary many people take for granted:
Being together.
Under one roof.
No hospital walls between them.
No monitors.
Just home.
Today, Sebastian weighs around 12 pounds and continues meeting developmental milestones consistent with his adjusted age. He occasionally requires oxygen support but is largely breathing on his own.
“To be born at 22 weeks and then to go home before your due date, eating everything by mouth, and really the only thing that you need is oxygen support — that speaks volumes,” Dr. Zank told 9News.
For the physician who once prepared his mother for unimaginable loss, seeing him home brought a different emotion:
Hope.
“I was thrilled that they were going to be together on Mother’s Day at home,” Zank told 9News. “And having this beautiful time together, knowing where she was at this point last year — feeling hopeless. And here we are, full of hope for the future.”
Hernandez said Mother’s Day no longer means what it once did.
After a year of fear, prayer, endurance and gratitude, the holiday has become a reminder of survival.
“Sunday is just a reminder of like, this is my day — of how strong, as a mom, you have to be to carry your family through the ups, the downs,” she told 9News.
And after everything — the uncertainty, the waiting rooms, the difficult phone calls, the 3% chance — one truth remains clearest to her:
“If anything in this world I’m doing right, it’s being their mom, and that’s all I can ask for and that’s all I want in this life.”
Last Mother’s Day, Vivian Hernandez was celebrating a pregnancy she had prayed for.
This Mother’s Day, she is holding the son doctors once feared she might never bring home.
The baby who fit in his father’s hand.
The baby given only a 3% chance.
The baby whose life became proof that sometimes hope survives where statistics say it shouldn’t.
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