forgot she gave birth to triplets after being pronounced ‘clinically dead’ for 45 minutes.
Marissa Christie recalled her hospital experience in an interview with Today, where she revealed that she suffered a rare complication after childbirth.
“The doctors had removed all three [μωρά] out. They were actually putting them on my stomach to do delayed clamping of the umbilical cord,” the mother told the publication about her C-section. “My hands went up and that’s when my heart stopped.”
Christy suffered an amniotic fluid embolism (AFE). According to the AFE Foundation, this is a rare condition in which amniotic fluid—the fluid that surrounds the baby in the womb during pregnancy—enters the mother’s bloodstream shortly after birth, and she has an allergic reaction.
Amniotic fluid normally enters the mother’s bloodstream during birth, but allergic reactions occur in only 2.5 out of every 100,000 births, or 1 in 40,000 in the United States.
While the triplets were successfully delivered by her doctor, Dr. Amber Samuel, was Christy’s anesthesiologist, Dr. Ricardo Mora, who noticed that she was having convulsions and he remembered that he had seen it before.
“It’s pretty devastating. When it does, it’s about 80%, 85% fatal,” Mora told Today. “I asked Dr. Samuel what she had done. She told me that she had just started to expel the placenta, and that’s usually when that happens—the separation of the placenta and the uterus.”
Then Christy he stopped breathing and had no pulsewhile the doctors started giving her CPR. She was then placed on ECMO, a machine that controls the heart and lungs so her body can recover without working so hard.
“She essentially lost what we consider her entire blood volume,” Mora said. “We replaced her blood volume. So for 45 minutes, she was clinically dead.”
“You can do the best CPR in the world, but if you don’t have enough blood in the brain, he’s basically alive but with brain damage,” he added. “She had to live to raise her children. So, it was something personal for me.”
“How could I not remember giving birth to my babies?»
Next he spent a whole week unconscious and when she woke up, she learned of the birth of her triplet girls: Kendall, Collins and Charlotte.
“My husband was like, ‘Well, we had the babies. They are healthy and wonderful,” said Christy. “I was absolutely terrified… How could I not remember giving birth to my babies?».
The mother explained how strange it was to meet her children when they were a few days old because she had not spent any time with them in the way a mother should normally have.
“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know these babies. This is very strange. I feel they are not real. I feel they are not mine,” he said. “It took me a while to get that connection with them».
However, doctors continued to hold the babies around Christy even when she was unconscious, in order to establish their connection.
“They could tell I was their mom,” she said. “They respond to me when I talk to them, unlike other people.”
Christy and the triplets are back home and she’s thankful she made it. “It’s rare, but it happens,” he said. “There were so many miracles that led to me living instead of dying and we are thankful.”
