Watch this mom hold her baby after overcoming pregnancy complications
Lindsey Schulz holds her little girl in the hospital after surviving life-threatening pregnancy complications.
humanity
In the middle of labor with her first child, Perrie Wilkof’s pulse stopped.
What had been a healthy pregnancy for the owner of the popular Dough Mama café in Columbus’ Clintonville neighborhood became a matter of life and death for her and her unborn daughter.
More in the opinion: “Black women have been screaming into the void for years.” Mothers are dying unnecessarily.
Surgeons, pediatricians, anesthesiologists and others at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center had to act quickly to stabilize the rapidly deteriorating mother and baby, whose own heart rate was dropping due to lack of oxygen. Every minute counted.
“You know, you think, ‘What if I’m one of those people who is unlucky?’ But everyone says, ‘No way, it’s so rare that you won’t be affected,'” Wilkof said while holding her happy and very talkative daughter in a recent interview with The Dispatch.
Yes, Wilkof and her little girl survived that day. She and her partner Nick Guyton, co-owner of Gemüt Biergarten, owe this in large part to two OSU doctors: Dr. Caroline Bank, who was the first to examine Wilkof and focused on stabilizing her, and Dr. Sema Hajmurad, the resident who performed the emergency C-section.
Her gratitude to these two doctors is anchored in the name of her daughter: Sema Caroline.
In the case of a rare complication, every minute counts
Nothing about Wilkof’s pregnancy suggested that she would almost die in childbirth.
She was scheduled to be induced a few days after Sema’s official due date, which is normal for women who are considered “older laborers” like 36-year-old Wilkof. Despite the induction, labor was slow, and 24 hours after arriving at the hospital, Wilkof’s cervix was not yet fully dilated.
The midwife caring for Wilkof tried to put in a mechanism to speed up the process. Eventually, labor started and Wilkof’s water broke, but labor was still progressing too slowly. They put in another mechanism to monitor labor when Wilkof suddenly started vomiting.
She felt like she couldn’t breathe. The last thing Wilkof remembered was the nurse saying her baby’s heart rate had dropped before she lost consciousness.
Then the midwife called Bank, who immediately intervened. She ordered a Caesarean section for Wilkof, and while she was preparing for the major operation, her patient’s pulse disappeared.
Bank began CPR and other life-saving measures while Hajmurad stepped in and performed the cesarean section. Both doctors worked simultaneously to save mother and baby. Within minutes, they handed newborn Sema over to pediatricians to take her to Nationwide Children’s Hospital and attempt to stop the bleeding in Wilkof’s now bleeding uterus.
“There’s that split second of disbelief, like this is really happening,” Bank recalls. “Then you have to focus so hard on what you can do and let the training guide you and focus all the fear and all the emotions on that… there’s a patient in front of me who needs help.”
Based on Wilkof’s symptoms, doctors believe she had an amniotic fluid embolism (AFE), although the condition is difficult to detect. It is a rare, life-threatening complication that can occur before, during, or after the birth of a baby when amniotic fluid enters the mother’s bloodstream, causing a sudden and severe allergic reaction. The mortality rate can be as high as 60%.
While AFEs may be rare, affecting about one in 40,000 births in the United States, traumatic or complicated births are not common in the United States.
According to the National Institutes of Health, up to 45% of new mothers experience birth trauma, the effects of which can last long after birth. According to CDC data, mothers in the United States also die more frequently than mothers in other high-income countries.
Giving birth can be a wonderful experience and often the happiest day in a person’s life, Bank stressed, but any birth or pregnancy can be traumatic.
“Pregnancy is not harmless, and exactly how that feels for any one person is an incredibly unique experience, but birth trauma is very real and very common,” Bank said. “There is no such thing as a low-risk pregnancy. I would say any pregnancy can start out low-risk and progress to high-risk pretty quickly.”
On the right path and together on the path to healing
After a successful surgery and careful observation, Wilkof survived. She spent five days in the hospital before she was finally able to meet her daughter, who was under observation at Nationwide Children’s, for the first time.
“When they were finally able to be together, it was very emotional,” said Guyton, who spent the five days commuting between his now nearly two-month-old daughter and his partner.
Wilkof and Guyton decided not to name Sema until they got to know her, and fended off questions about paperwork and next steps until they were reunited as a family. But the names they had considered no longer seemed to fit their newest member.
“We were just at home talking about how grateful we are to these two women,” he said. “Well, the whole team, but especially to these two women.”
Wilkof, whose recovery has been difficult, couldn’t remember the names of the women who saved her life at that moment, but when Guyton told her, “they just felt right.”
Bank cried when Wilkof and Guyton told her and Hajmurad, and Bank called it the “highest honor” as a doctor.
“It was just an incredible affirmation that they got through this and are healing together,” she said.
Samantha Hendrickson is the Columbus Dispatch’s medical and health reporter. Reach her at [email protected]
