On the "HypochondriActor" podcast hosted by Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali, Penn Badgley opened up about the scary medical condition he had as a baby, as he was born two months premature. He revealed that he had a malfunction in his heart and lungs that required constant resuscitation and close monitoring, causing him to spend weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU. "My heart and lungs would stop repeatedly throughout the day, so I was on my heart monitor," he said. Badgley added that his mother had to learn how to resuscitate him "viscerally" once he was ready to be discharged from the hospital. "The first time she had to do it was on the way home from the hospital," he shared. "[The doctors] basically said, 'This will happen immediately, so you're going to have to.' And [it occurred] until about [the age of] 1."
While it's not clear which medical condition the actor was born with, many premature infants experience a similar health problem called apnea, which happens when newborns stop breathing for short periods of time and experience a drop in the heart rate. While it can sometimes affect even full-term newborns, apnea occurs in most pre-term babies and can happen once or multiple times daily. However, it usually goes away on its own with time; most infants "outgrow" apnea by the time they reach 36 weeks or about a year old. For Badgley, "it sort of like... it just faded away."
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