Is there life after death, philosophers and scientists, believers and agnostics are still arguing. 30-year-old American Nicole Hall knows for sure: there is. She herself returned from the other world, actually dying during childbirth.
The tragedies did not bode well. Nicole and her husband Anthony were expecting their third child. The previous childbirth was successful, the older children were healthy. And this pregnancy proceeded like a textbook. If there was something wrong, Nicole, the registered nurse, would definitely notice it. But, we repeat, everything 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 UCHealth Hospital in Colorado Springs.
Until a certain moment, everything went smoothly, the spouses (the husband was present at the birth) calmly communicated on various topics, did not worry, discussed the birth of the baby, but suddenly …
Nicole remembers practically nothing. She only says that it suddenly became very hot and she began to vomit. But her husband remembers these moments every second.
“She asked for a damp cloth, I went for her,” he told the Australian newspaper Anthony. – At that moment, the 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 called out to Anthony to put an oxygen mask on his wife’s face. She, in a panic, already blue, 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, she needed emergency resuscitation help.
It became clear later that Nicole had an amniotic fluid embolism. Amniotic fluid entered the woman’s circulatory system.
To be clear, embolism is still the leading cause of maternal deaths 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 coats. One nurse with difficulty restrained Anthony, who was eager to see his wife, the rest carried out resuscitation measures. All this lasted six minutes. And then swiftly – past the stunned relatives who were waiting in the corridor – the gurney with Nicole was brought into the operating room.
“I fell to my knees and began to pray. – Anthony still cannot calmly remember this. “But several doctors and a priest came up to me. They asked permission for a posthumous caesarean section. Nicole died … “
Yes, at that moment everyone was sure of this. And now it was a race against death to save at least a child.
Emergency room doctor Leslie Moats was called to the operating room. Later, the surgeon recalled: he did not even think that the “blue code” from the department of obstetrics and gynecology could have anything to do with him. He calmly dealt with his patients, but some kind of anxiety still made him rise to the challenge.
What he saw in the operating room shocked him. Woman in labor – no pulse, no breathing, cardiac arrest. At that moment, one of the nurses put a scalpel in his hand and said: “She has been dead for five minutes. You have to get the baby right now. “
The count went on for seconds. Without anesthesia, without antiseptic treatment – why, she’s dead! – the surgeon cut Nicole’s stomach literally from hip to thigh. The waters were without blood.
“A good sign,” the doctor barely had time to think before he gasped. The child has already sunk into the mother’s pelvis so much that the doctor hooked the baby with a scalpel – cut it from the shoulder to the armpit, fortunately, without touching the head. The surgeon was at a loss 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 after a few minutes the boy screamed. Anthony, meanwhile, braced himself, went to the operating room. Say goodbye to your beloved wife.
“I asked the nurses to let me in to see her. Hug one last time. But they told me that they not only got the child, but also restored Nicole’s pulse and blood pressure! ” – a man cannot restrain his emotions.
Yes, you can call it a miracle, but almost immediately after the baby was born, the mother, whom everyone considered 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 the cesarean, carried out by 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. “This is not a sight 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 recollection: 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 he even finds the strength to joke: “It was the worst baby gender recognition party in my life.”
It’s amazing, but in four days, both mom and baby, who was named Haxton, almost completely recovered. And their history has become unique: only a few survive amniotic fluid embolism. As a rule, either the mother, or the baby, or both, die.
The Hall family is doing well now. Only a scar on the boy’s body – from the shoulder to the armpit – reminds of how Haxton was born. And Nicole herself now tells 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 photograph taken that day. Her husband is sobbing, bending over the incubator with the baby. He mourns his lost wife, mourns filial orphanhood.
“This is my husband, a man of unimaginably strong spirit, at the moment when he realizes that he is entering lonely fatherhood,” the young mother signed a picture on the social network. – At this moment he is trying to realize what happened. And this photo hurts me immensely: why wasn’t I next to him at that moment? Why couldn’t I see how my child was born, hear the doctors say that it was a boy? I understand that the fact that I survived is a miracle, a blessing from God. But it’s hard for me to look at this picture because it’s a man who just lost his wife is crying. And this is something that I will never accept. “