Every journey into parenthood is different. Some recount the day they took their first pregnancy test. Others, the day they heard their newborns heartbeat in an ultrasound. For Aman and Kamal, their journey began on a quiet Sunday morning, 25 weeks into their pregnancy.
“I was cleaning the bathroom,” Aman recalls. “I was 25 weeks pregnant, and my lower back was hurting. I didn’t think much of it at first.”
Then she noticed spotting.
“My first instinct was to ignore it,” Aman says. “You push aside small health problems. But this wasn’t about me anymore. I was carrying two living beings.”
Standing in the elevator on the way to the Family Birthing Unit at Surrey Memorial Hospital, Aman had an intuitive feeling she wouldn’t be going home that night.
“It all went by so quickly,” Aman says. “They told me I was delivering my babies that day, and all I could think was, it’s too early. How will they survive this? There was no time to process anything. It was out of our control.”
By 9 p.m., they welcomed their babies into the world: a daughter, Rania, and a son, Sher.
What followed moved just as fast. After the urgency of labour and delivery, there was no pause to catch her breath. One moment, Aman was pregnant. The next, her babies were born and taken straight to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Surrey Memorial.
Aman stayed in the hospital for two nights.
The morning after giving birth, as soon as she was able, she went straight to see Rania and Sher. But eventually, she and Kamal had to leave.
“When we came home empty-handed,” Aman says, “that’s when it really hit me.”
Finding the warmth
The NICU had a rhythm they were still learning to understand. Doctors came in for rounds. Conversations were filled with medical terms that moved faster than they could absorb.
“I would leave feeling confused,” Aman says. “And frightened, the burning question in my head, ‘Do babies get to go home from here?’”
The space itself felt cold at first. Clean, sterile and unfamiliar. Seeing their babies in incubators, surrounded by wires and monitors, made the distance feel even greater. In stark contrast, the people working inside that space brought something entirely different.
“The doctors and nurses brought kindness and warmth into that space,” Aman says. “They came with information, context, reassurance. They made us feel as comfortable as you can be in such an uncomfortable situation.”
Among them, Aman and Kamal recall many moments when Rania’s nurse, Sydney, and Dr. Moodley took extra time to make them feel at ease. They kept them informed at every step and reminded them that they were not facing this alone.
As the days passed, Aman and Kamal began recognizing other parents in the NICU. Quiet connections formed, sometimes through shared language, other times through shared glances that needed no words at all.
“We saw another baby come in. Also born at 25 weeks,” Aman remembers. “And I remembered how it felt to be on that side. Helpless. It’s a feeling you don’t understand unless you’re living it.”
Without hesitation, Aman and Kamal went to them, offering the same reassurance they had been given along their own journey.
Rania Kaur Gill
Rania was 20 days old.
She had been fighting an infection and developed pneumonia from her breathing tube.
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault,” Aman says. They received a call from Surrey Memorial Hospital at 1 a.m.
They dropped everything and went to the hospital.
When they arrived, Rania was in her room. A small blanket was laid gently over her.
The doctor checked her pulse.
And then, quietly, there was nothing more to do.
“Our hands were on top of the blanket,” Aman says. “Over her body.”
“There was no time to heal,” she says.
In those early days, Kamal had been afraid to touch his babies.
“When they were born, the nurse told me it was okay to do hand hugs,” he says. “I was terrified. They were so tiny.”
He hadn’t held them skin-to-skin at first. After Rania passed away, that quickly changed. That same evening, Kamal held Sher skin-to-skin.
Holding his son did not erase the grief. But it lifted the weight of it, if only for a moment.
“For that moment,” Kamal says, “I forgot what had happened twelve hours earlier.” It gave them strength. It gave them something to hold onto.
A journey taken, never alone
Sher was discharged in August 2025.
There was no single moment that marked the end of their journey. Just a gradual realization that they were finally going home together. Sher was stronger. He no longer needed the same level of support. The constant watchfulness slowly began to ease.
Today, Sher is a healthy, growing baby. Curious, bubbly, and full of personality. He keeps his parents very much awake at night.
The journey Aman and Kamal walked will always carry both grief and gratitude.
The NICU staff at Surrey Memorial Hospital were there for them through the hardest moments of their lives. Guiding them through uncertainty, loss and hope with compassion and steadiness.
Because of that, Aman and Kamal feel a deep desire to give back. To support the people who stood beside them when their journey was at its most fragile.
While their deeply personal journey was shaped by both loss and hope, they never had to walk it alone.
