A pair of Nebraska nurses who married after meeting in their hospital’s NICU added another member to their family when they adopted a premature infant they had cared for.

Taylor and Drew Deras tied the knot in 2020 after working together at the Methodist Women’s Hospital in Omaha. The next year, they met baby Ella when she was born at just 23 weeks, ABC News reports.

While caring for her in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), Taylor knew she “wanted that challenge as a nurse to be able to take care of her and kind of see where things would go and what she would do.”

“She was at the very edge of being able to survive, essentially,” Drew told Good Morning America last week.

Little Ella was in the NICU with the Derases for eight months before being transferred to another hospital’s NICU. 

“She was intubated for multiple months at a time,” Taylor said. “She was just very sick. There [were] times where the doctors would tell us, ‘Watch her. I don’t know if she’ll make it through the night tonight.'”

However, Ella began to beat the odds over time.

“Eventually, she kind of pulled out of it, got better, and started eating from a bottle [and] was on just a little bit of oxygen support,” Taylor said.

It is unclear what happened to Ella’s biological family, but when the Derases heard that she became a ward of the state in December 2021, they stepped up to the plate.

“As she became a ward of the state, I actually turned to Drew and I was like, ‘I really do care for her and I want to bring her home and care for her as our child,'” Taylor said. “So it was, I loved her as my patient, and then once we became foster parents, I loved her as my own child.”

While Ella remained in the hospital, her newfound foster parents never left her side until she was released in April 2022.

“As a foster parent, it was just like, the guard that you had prior to protect yourself of not falling in love with someone else’s child, it just fizzled away, and you’re just like, ‘OK, this child needs me and I need them,'” Drew said.

On November 13, 2023 — National Adoption Day — the Derases adopted Ella on what they described as a “perfect day.”

“When the judge said, ‘She is now your child,’ it was … this is what we’ve been praying for and what we’ve been wanting. And it was really like a dream come true,” the new mother said.

“It was even more perfect than you could have imagined,” the new father added. “It’s hard to compare it to anything else. I mean, I’d say like our wedding day is the only one that you could compare it to.”

Now Ella is walking, talking, and “meeting developmental milestones that a 2-year-old would do,” Taylor said. “And she’ll start preschool in the fall.”

The couple says they feel “lucky” for their newfound “miracle” baby, and think “this is so meant to be.”

“Don’t give up during the process because the adoption process is very challenging,” Taylor said, giving advice to other prospective adoptive parents. “If it’s something that’s on your heart, I would say go for it and don’t steer away, because there are [many] kids that need adoption.”