'Please God, let them live': Colts' Ryan Kelly, wife and twin boys who fought to survive

INDIANAPOLIS -- A towering Christmas tree sparkling with lights, tinsel and handmade ornaments of two little boys on horses that Ryan Kelly brought back from the Colts' game in Germany, will soon be glistening inside the Kellys' home -- just five minutes away from the cemetery where their daughter Mary Kate is buried.

In the two Christmases since Mary Kate was delivered stillborn in December 2021, the Kellys haven't had the heart or the cheer or the joy to decorate for the holidays. The last thing Emma Kelly did, before going to the hospital and finding out Mary Kate didn't have a heartbeat, was buy her daughter her very own tiny tree with pink, glittery decorations.

But this year is different. It is so incredibly, miraculously different.

"It feels good. It's exciting again. That tree is going up," said Emma. "I just can't wait to see it through their eyes."

Through their eyes.

The Kellys are sitting on the couch in the basement of their Indianapolis home with their twin baby boys, Ford and Duke, in their arms. Their boys. Their sons. Not so long ago, neither of them knew if this beautiful thing called parenthood would ever become reality.

Not after they sat in a hospital holding their lifeless daughter, delivered at 19.5 weeks gestation, listening to the cries of newborns all around. Not after they walked out of the hospital, leaving Mary Kate behind, with nothing more than a handcrafted birth certificate and a few memories.

The day Mary Kate died changed the Kellys forever. But even after her death, they did not give up on their dreams of becoming parents.

"I dreamed about the sleepless nights with babies waking up every hour. If I could just go back to the me a year ago and just hold her and let her know it was coming," said Emma, "because you don't know if you're ever going to get those days."

'The heartache outweighed everything else'

The Kellys tried all last year to get pregnant. It's hard to describe the disappointment that comes month after month after month, the desperation and despair, said Emma. The Kellys wanted nothing more than a baby. And not just one baby. They wanted a big, happy family with laughter and chaos and love all around.

"It was really heartbreaking," said Emma. "So, we were just in a really, really tough spot."

The couple started researching in vitro fertilization, or IVF. It wasn't something they really wanted to do at first. Emma, especially, struggled with the decision.

"I felt a lot of shame in it and felt like it was me admitting that I couldn't do it and that was tough to swallow, because we had no problem getting pregnant with Mary Kate," said Emma. "But I think the heartache outweighed everything else we were feeling."

On Christmas Eve morning of 2022, Ryan and Emma started IVF, a procedure in which an egg is removed from a woman's ovaries and fertilized with sperm in a lab. Five days later, the fertilized egg, called an embryo, is returned to the woman's womb to grow and develop.

The Kellys opted to have two embryos put back into Emma's womb.

"I don't know what came over us. I think just our faith and knowing we had a little help from above," said Emma. "There was definitely no guarantee that one or, let alone, both would stick."

After the procedure, the doctors were adamant, telling the Kellys not to take a pregnancy test early on, because it would probably come back negative. But one day, not long after the procedure, Emma was feeling different.

She snuck into the bathroom, without telling Ryan, to take a pregnancy test. And there on that little white stick was the faintest of lines. Emma started bawling and ran out to tell Ryan. He started crying and the two held each other in their arms for what seemed like forever.

They were pregnant again. They were ecstatic. But they were also very scared. The loss of Mary Kate was always in their hearts and minds.

Then at an ultrasound, the Kellys sat and watched in disbelief. There on the monitor were two sacs with heartbeats. Both babies had made it.

"It was incredible," said Ryan. The Kellys had done a fresh transfer, which means they didn't choose the genders of their babies. "We weren't going to play the hand of God. We didn't care. Whatever we get, if it's two boys, two girls, a boy and a girl, it doesn't matter. We want healthy babies."

As Emma went through her first trimester, it was tough. She was on bed rest much of the time. But she sat in her bed and prayed for healthy babies, prayed they would be OK.

"I can't even put into words the fear and anxiety," Emma said. "Getting your hopes up is terrifying."

Every week was a milestone, making it through six weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks. And then when they made it to 20 weeks, when they lost Mary Kate, the Kellys breathed a sigh of relief. They knew they weren't out of the woods yet, said Ryan, still things seemed to be better than they had before.

But in June, when Emma was nearly 27 weeks along, the Kellys traveled to Nashville for a wedding for a friend. And there, the frantic, terrifying, horrible memories returned when Emma went into preterm labor.

At the hospital, the Kellys sat in shock as doctors told them their twin baby boys would have to be delivered.

"The only thing I could mutter was, 'Let them live,'" Emma said. "'Please God, just let them live and the rest we can deal with.'"

'We were both freaking out'

The week before Nashville, the Kellys had been in Florida on vacation with Ryan's family when Emma noticed she wasn't feeling Ford's movements the way she knew she should feel them.

After Mary Kate died, the Kellys became fierce advocates for Count the Kicks, an organization that educates on the importance of fetal movement.

"'Something's not right. We're going to the hospital,'" Emma told Ryan. "'I don't feel Ford the way that I should.'"

The Kellys drove to the nearest Florida hospital with a neonatal intensive care unit where doctors monitored Emma, and soon Ford started moving around again. They told the Kellys everything was fine.

After returning home to Indiana, the Kellys loaded up their car and drove to Nashville for the wedding. "And then we get to Nashville and just little things started to happen," said Emma.

She noticed a change in her cervical mucus and called her doctor right away. The doctor said that was normal entering the third trimester, but if Emma noticed pain, bleeding or cramping to get to a hospital immediately.

Ryan and Emma went to lunch and headed back to their hotel to get ready for the wedding when Emma started feeling "period cramps." She knew immediately she needed to go to the hospital.

During that 15-minute ride, Emma's cramps went from light to full-blown contractions that were 10 to 20 seconds apart. When they arrived at the hospital, Emma was in so much pain she could barely stand in the waiting room.

"I mean there's no doubt about it, I knew something was wrong," said Emma. "I was sick to my stomach that I might be losing them."

"We were both freaking out," Ryan said.

Emma was hospitalized at Ascension St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville and her preterm labor was held off for five days, getting her to 27 weeks, which was critical. Every day a baby can stay inside the womb means a better chance of survival and fewer complications after birth.

But as the doctors were ready to release the Kellys to go home to Indy, telling them to drive straight to a hospital there, they did one more cervical check on Emma. She was dilated to three centimeters.

The hospital's head of fetal medicine came in and told the Kellys he was very sorry, but their babies had to be delivered immediately.

"You hear that you're going to deliver your babies right now and that is your new reality," Emma said. "I mean it was just like the rug was ripped out from underneath us all over again in a very different way."

But this time, their babies lived.

Ford was born first, weighing 2 pounds, 2 ounces, at 7:40 a.m. on June 27. Duke was born nearly two hours later by C-section at 9:30 a.m., weighing 2 pounds. Both were immediately admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit.

And for the next 85 days, the Kellys waited in fear and with great hope, as they watched their sons fight for their lives.

'I'll take good care of your boys'

The Kellys say without the "angels" in that NICU at St. Thomas they don't know what they would have done.

It was a scary time walking into a room filled with babies so small they could fit in the palm of a hand, their tiny bodies hooked up to wires, being needled and prodded and getting blood transfusions with beeping monitors all around.

Dr. Kendall Graham, a neonatal medicine specialist at St. Thomas, was one of those angels.

"It was so tough to go in there, but I'll never forget him. He's part of our family now," Ryan said. "He told us, 'I'll take good care of your boys,' and he meant it."

The Kellys learned the reason Emma went into preterm labor was because she had a urinary tract infection. She had no symptoms of it before the movement changes of Ford, the cervical mucus and the cramps.

But that infection had spread to Ford's blood and caused him to have a slow leak in his water, which caused Emma to go into premature labor, which the Kellys now are so grateful for.

"Had my body not gone into preterm labor, it would have killed him," said Emma "If there were a bingo card for birthing trauma, I think we've hit them all. I think we've hit every one of them, but…"

But still she is so thankful. "I try not to get caught up in why we always have to take the hard route, the extremely hard route, but it really doesn't matter," she said. "They're here and that's all that matters."

The Kellys are thankful for the NICU team who fought for their boys. After they were born at 2 pounds, both boys dropped to 1 pound, 14 ounces and then battled back. The worrisome medical issues that showed up on their scans soon went away.

"Every obstacle that we thought that they were having in the NICU, they overcame," Emma said. "The nurses called them the miracle babies. These guys just fought every day."

As Ford and Duke fought in Nashville, Ryan had to go back to Indy for football. Emma went every single day to the NICU, 10 to 12 hour days, with her boys. But she was not alone.

The nurses loved the Kellys' babies like their own. They decorated their rooms with a football theme. They printed out mini jerseys and put Duke Kelly and Ford Kelly on them with their weights. The nurses handcrafted "grammys" when each boy got to 1,000 grams weight, or 2.2 pounds.

Dr. Graham was there at every turn, helping them through their journey. The Kellys gave him a Colts Ryan Kelly jersey with each of the boys' footprints on the numbers seven and eight.

The Kellys' story had a joyful, beautiful ending, but Emma said it is not always happy endings in the NICU.

There was a baby boy named Rhett who was born just hours after Ford and Duke, who was in an incubator next to the Kellys'. Rhett was born at 25 weeks and made it five weeks. He was one of the toughest little guys in the NICU, Emma said. But Rhett didn't make it. The Kellys grieved the loss of that little boy.

The nurses grieved, too. All of them sat around and prayed for Rhett. They never left him alone. They went to his funeral.

"These nurses are angels on earth," Emma said. "It just continues to blow my mind how much patience and love they have for total strangers. We were supposed to be in that hospital. We were supposed to be in those hands, and these boys are here and beautiful and healthy because of it."

'We prayed for this so hard'

Ford and Duke are, technically, almost five months old, but they are eight weeks adjusted, the age they would be if they had made it full term. Ford now weighs almost 11 pounds and Duke is 11 and a half pounds.

Inside the Kellys' home last week, Ryan held Ford, who Emma calls "Ryan Jr." Duke got her family's side of the genes. He looks just like Emma's grandpa.

But it's not just their physical attributes. Ford is so much like Ryan, very chill and just along for the ride. As long as he's fed and held, he's happy, said Ryan. Duke is feistier, like his mother. He is quick to let them know when things aren't going his way.

New parenting is hard, especially when both babies are screaming their heads off, Emma said, and sometimes she cries, too.

"But I just have the perspective that we prayed for this so hard," she said, as she held Duke. "There are no really hard, truly hard days. Every day is the best day when I get to wake up and see and hold these boys. None of it was ever guaranteed, ever. It's so worth it. Just for this. Just for these sweet snuggles."

The snuggles they always dreamed of having with Mary Kate.

After Mary Kate died, the Kellys moved from their home in Zionsville to one in Indianapolis, just two miles from their daughter's cemetery. When they brought their boys home in a jet provided by the Colts, one of the first things they did was take them to their sister's grave.

"We put them down next to her grave. They will always know exactly who their big sister is and just how much she did," Emma said. "I truly believe in that, that they were covered by her from above and that she had everything to do with them getting here safely. I can't wait to tell them and talk about her to them for all of our years to come."

Ford and Duke were baptized Saturday, wearing the same gowns Emma and Ryan were baptized in as babies. When they got home, Ryan and Emma put their sons in Christmas pajamas.

Finally, after two years of heartache, the Kellys can celebrate this season. Finally, they feel the joy of parenthood. Two, sweet, beautiful and, most importantly, healthy baby boys.

Advice and help for parents of preemies

Give yourself some grace: "You can't do it alone. You have to ask for help, and it's okay to step away. I remember thinking if I didn't come into the NICU early enough, or if I left early, or if I didn't hold them the whole time that I could hold them, I had so much guilt," Emma said. "What I wish I could have told myself was, 'You have to take care of yourself.' Taking care of yourself and allowing yourself to heal is the best thing that you could do for your children."

Let people help you: "I wanted to box myself into a dark hole. I wanted to go home and hide in my bedroom and cry, but our friends came, whether I liked it or not," Emma said. "Our family came and it made all the difference. It helped pull me up toward the surface, and I needed that."

Acknowledge the loss: "The NICU is traumatic and it's a loss in its own right. You're losing your pregnancy, you're losing so much," Emma said. "I remember watching the seasons change as I was sitting in a hospital room and just thinking of all the things that we missed out on. It's a huge loss and a trauma and it's alright to grieve what you thought it should be."

Advocate for your babies: "You're already so strung out and uncomfortable and the whole thing just feels unnatural," Emma said. "But whatever your situation is, you can advocate for your babies." Emma wanted her boys to come home on breast milk. "I knew what was best for them. I knew what would be best for them long-term, too. I think sometimes in the NICU, it's all about survival, so you have to fight."

It's OK to ask questions: "I think we feel like we're bugging them, or being a nuisance, but you absolutely should ask questions, and they're happy to answer," Emma said. "Our nurses were happy to take care of us. And write everything down so you remember to ask them, because you always forget in the moment. Don't be afraid to ask."

For information and support, visit March of Dimes NICU Family Support, IU's NICU Nest Family Support Program or NICU Helping Hands

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via e-mail: dbenbow@indystar.com.