The woman diеd during сhild birth and was resurrected after a саеsаrean
Tragedy did not portend anything. Nicole and her husband Anthony were expecting their third child. Previous births were successful, older children were healthy.
And this pregnancy proceeded like a textbook. Well, if there was something wrong, Nicole, a registered nurse, would definitely notice it. But everything, we repeat, went well.
February 13, 2018 is the day when the life of their family was divided into “before” and “after”. With an opening of seven centimeters, Nicole arrived at the UCHealth hospital in Colorado Springs.
Until a certain moment, everything went smoothly, the spouses (the husband was present at the birth) calmly talked on various topics, did not worry, discussed the birth of the baby, but suddenly …
Nicole remembers almost nothing. She only says that it suddenly became very hot and she began to feel sick. But her husband remembers these moments every second.
“She asked for a damp washcloth, I went to get her,” Anthony told the Australian edition of Mammamia. At that moment a nurse came in to see how the process was progressing. Suddenly, Nicole blushed sharply, arched and began to repeat that she had nothing to breathe.
The nurse yelled at Anthony to put an oxygen mask on his wife’s face. In a panic, already turning blue, she tried to rip it off. The nurse began to urgently give Nicole an indirect heart massage and shouted that there was a «blue code» in her ward,
that is, emergency resuscitation was needed.
It later became clear that Nicole had an amniotic fluid embolism. The amniotic fluid entered the woman’s circulatory system.
To be clear, embolism is still the leading cause of maternal death in childbirth worldwide. Once in the blood, amniotic fluid can lead to extensive bleeding, cardiac arrest, and cessation of lung function.
In just a few seconds, the ward was filled with people in medical gowns. One nurse had difficulty restraining Anthony, who was rushing to his wife, the rest carried out resuscitation.
All this went on for six minutes. And then swiftly — past the stunned relatives waiting in the corridor — Nicole’s gurney was brought into the operating room.
“I fell on my knees and began to pray. — Anthony still can not calmly think about it. “But several doctors and a priest came up to me. They requested permission for a post-mortem caesarean section. Nicole is dead…
Yes, at that moment everyone was sure of it. And now it was a race against death to have time to save at least a child.
Emergency room doctor Leslie Moats was called into the operating room. The surgeon later recalled: he did not even think that the “blue code” from the obstetrics and gynecology department could have something to do with him.
He calmly attended to his patients, but some anxiety nevertheless forced him to rise to the challenge.
What he saw in the operating room shocked him. A woman in labor — without a pulse, without breathing, with cardiac arrest. At that moment, one of the nurses put a scalpel in his hand and said, “She’s been dead for five minutes. You have to get the baby right now.»
The count went by seconds. Without anesthesia, without antiseptic treatment — why, she’s dead! — the surgeon cut Nicole’s stomach literally from thigh to thigh. The waters were without blood.
A good sign, the doctor barely had time to think before he caught his breath. The child had already sunk into the mother’s pelvis so much that the doctor hooked the baby with a scalpel — cut from the shoulder to the armpit, fortunately without hitting the head.
The surgeon was confused for a moment, but continued his work: leg, arm, shoulder … As a result, together with the nurse, they removed the lifeless baby.
The baby was rushed to the intensive care unit, and within minutes the boy was screaming. Anthony, meanwhile, plucked up the courage to go to the operating room. Say goodbye to your beloved wife.
“I asked the nurses to let me see her. Hug for the last time. But they told me that they not only got the baby, but also restored Nicole’s pulse and pressure!” The man cannot contain his emotions.
Yes, yes, you can call it a miracle, but almost immediately after the baby was born, the mother, who everyone thought was dead, came to life. The surgeon was shocked no less than Nicole’s husband, because the woman was already treated like a corpse.
True, she was very weak, during a cesarean performed for profit, she lost at least 4 liters of blood. She had to perform an emergency hysterectomy — removal of the uterus. And the next day for her was literally a tug of war — between life and death.
“She looked exactly like a corpse,” Anthony recalls the first time he saw his wife after a cesarean. “The spectacle is not for the faint of heart.”
And what about Nicole herself?
She does not remember anything from the moment she asked her husband for a damp cloth. Her next memory: she is already under a ventilator in the intensive care unit and does not understand at all what happened.
“I tried to ask what happened, who was born to me at all, but I couldn’t,” says the young mother. And even finds the strength to joke: «It was the most terrible party to find out the sex of the baby in my life.»
It’s amazing, but in four days, both mom and baby, who was named Haxton, almost completely recovered. And their story has become unique: few people experience amniotic fluid embolism. As a rule, either the mother, or the baby, or both die.
The Hall family is doing well now. About how Haxton was born, only a scar on the boy’s body reminds me — from shoulder to armpit. And Nicole herself is now telling her story so that as many people as possible understand:
childbirth is not just a walk to the hospital and back. This is hard work, which, despite the development of medicine, can still be deadly. And everyone should know about it.
Nicole also cries every time she sees a photo taken that day. Her husband is sobbing, leaning over the incubator with the baby. He mourns his dead wife, mourns his filial orphanhood.
