Julene Darrell was born so premature in 2010 that every day she lived was a miracle.

She arrived in the world at about 25 weeks’ old and weighed less than two pounds. She could not breathe on her own, regulate her body temperature or produce her own blood.

Fifteen years later, Julene plans to enter her second semester of boarding school in the US — and hardly sees a difference between herself and her peers.

“Even though I was born premature, I’m still like the other kids,” she said. “It didn’t change anything.”

Julene spends her time like any other teenager — she enjoys making new friends, watching school sports and occasionally helping her father, Steve, with his hobbies in video production.

She enjoyed a stint as class president last year and now has a learning permit for a car.

Julene grew up with stories of how premature she had been and the difficulties of her early infancy but did not feel defined by it.

She said: “Ever since I was little up until now, people told me about how small I was.

“They’ll even pull out the baby stuff I’d had and they’d tell me about how I was so small that I wouldn’t fit into any baby clothes so they had to dress me for dolls’ clothes.”

Julene was born about four months early after her mother, Sandy, had complications with a dilated cervix.

Sandy Darrell was expected to have an operation in the US to close her cervix and prevent a miscarriage but went through contractions at exactly 25 weeks and gave birth to Julene after about five minutes of labour.

The Darrell family shared their miracle experience with The Royal Gazette in 2011 and were confident their now oldest daughter would pull through.

The family live in Atlanta, Georgia.

During a visit to Bermuda, Mr Darrell said: “I’m 100 per cent proud to see her talent and skill, especially all the things that came directly from her.”

He said his daughter had only had one health scare in her life, when she suffered a brain bleed in December 2020 that required surgery.

He explained that Julene suffered a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors discovered she had a cerebral cavernous hemangioma, a benign tumour caused by a malformation in the brain’s blood vessels.

Mr Darrell said this condition was not caused by her premature birth but a genetic mutation that was common on his side of the family.

He explained: “My aunt, Julene Darrell, whom my daughter is named after, died of a brain aneurysm in 1998 from it.

“This was before the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital had the MRI capability to detect the condition.

“My mother, Lee-Ann Darrell, also had to get surgery for it in 1999 and my grandfather, Leroy Darrell, had seizures his whole life as a result of it.”

Mr Darrell had his family tested to confirm the condition but nothing grave has happened to Julene or the family since.

Julene, their oldest, was not the last premature baby the family would welcome into the world.

Their second daughter, Rylee, now aged 12, was born slightly premature, athough not as early as her big sister.

Mr Darrell said that it was not until their third child — 10-year-old Steve Jr — that the parents had a full-term birth.

He said that because of his family’s experience with managing a premature birth, he and his wife learnt to help counsel other parents who were in similar situations.

He added: “As a father, I hoped to see this — but actually seeing it happen is very emotional for me.”