Amelia Tillman lay in maternity triage watching the clock. Five months pregnant with twins, she'd been rushed the day before to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital after she suddenly started bleeding.

She got a shot of steroids to help the babies if they came early. Age 40 and in no pain, she didn't think it would come to that.

But at 17 minutes till noon on May 8, 2001, her vital signs crashed. Her life-giving placenta had torn away from her babies, a rare complication with no known cause. She was losing more blood than doctors could pump back in.

Her husband, Drew Tillman, was told: "We have to take them now or we are going to lose everybody."

Amoreena came first, at 1.6 pounds. Brother Dylan, less than 1.13 pounds, was grabbed next. They were whisked to the neonatal intensive-care unit, where they would stay for about four months, struggling to survive miserable odds.

With tubes protruding from their fragile, incomplete bodies, they endured illness, surgeries and terrifying setbacks. But there were tiny milestones. There were miracles.

Today the 7-year-olds are in second grade at Kate Sullivan Elementary. Dylan's lingering respiratory problems don't keep him from baseball. Amoreena has tightness in her legs but does gymnastics.

"It is incredible what could be wrong and what isn't with our children," said their musician father.

To see them now, running, laughing, learning, it's hard to think that these vibrant children almost didn't make it.

"Somewhere in my mind I still see a baby in the ICU," Amelia said.

They were a breath away from losing Dylan.

One rainy night, about a month after he was born, one of his monitors starting bleating. He was having trouble breathing. His oxygen levels were dropping dangerously.

"He was just so tired, he couldn't do it anymore," his mother said.

She began praying. The medical team did what they could. But eventually the doctor turned to Drew: "He's dying. What do you want us to do?"

Drew asked for four more hours before they'd take away life support. He made a last request to carry Dylan outside for the first time to feel the rain.

Just before time ran out, Amelia, who never stopped praying over her boy, groaned and cried out: "Oh God, save my son!"

In that moment, Drew said, something inside Amelia broke. She seemed to step out of time, becoming ageless in her anguished appeal to God.

"I looked up and the oxygen-level monitor started to go up, one by one by one," Drew recalled, crying even now. "The doctor said, 'That is not us. . . . This is a miracle, because Dylan was on his way out.'"

Drew said he was hit by a wave of peace.

"You don't go through this without believing in God," he said. "Only the parents who go through it really know."

There would still be months of harrowing days. The Tillmans kept watch over the two incubators. Dylan finally came home first. Amoreena followed a few weeks later.

Both children through the years have seen more than their share of doctors, and physical and speech therapists. But as they approach their eighth birthday, they're expected to be all caught up with kids lucky enough not to leave their mother's womb too soon.

"I want people to know it can happen to anyone," Amelia said, "and you can get through it."