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A mother from Texas says she forgot giving birth to triplets after being declared “clinically dead” for 45 minutes.
Marisa Christie recalled her experience in the hospital in an interview with Today, where she revealed she suffered a rare post-birth complication.
“The doctors had pulled all three [babies] out. Actually, they were resting them on my stomach to do a delayed cord clamping,” the mother told the publication about her cesarean section. “My arms flew up, and that was when my heart stopped.”
Christie experienced an amniotic fluid embolism (AFE). According to the AFE Foundation, this is a rare condition in which amniotic fluid — the fluid that surrounds a baby in the womb during pregnancy — enters the mother’s bloodstream shortly after birth and the mother has an allergic reaction.
Amniotic fluid normally enters the mother’s bloodstream during birth but allergic reactions only occur in 2.5 for every 100,000 births or 1 in 40,000 in the United States.
While the triplets were successfully delivered by her physician, Dr. Amber Samuel, it was Christie’s anesthesiologist Dr. Ricardo Mora who noticed she was seizing and remembered seeing an AFE before.
“It’s pretty catastrophic. When it occurs, it’s about 80 percent, 85 percent fatal,” Mora told Today. “I asked Dr. Samuel what she had done. She related to me that she had just started pulling the placenta out and that’s usually the time when this occurs — the separation of the placenta and uterus.”
Christie then stopped breathing and had no pulse as the doctors began performing CPR. She was then placed on ECMO, a machine that controls the heart and lungs so her body can recover without working as hard.
“She essentially lost what we consider her whole 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 get enough blood to the brain, essentially they are alive but with brain damage,” he added. “I needed her to live to raise her kids. So, it was a personal thing for me.”
She then spent an entire week unconscious and by the time she woke up, she learned about the birth of her three triplet girls: Kendall, Collins, and Charlotte.
“My husband was like, ‘Hey, so we had the babies. They’re healthy and great,’” Christie said. “I was absolutely terrified… How could I not remember having my babies?”
The mother explained how strange it felt to meet her children when they were a couple of days old because she didn’t have any time with them in the way a mother normally would.
“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know these babies. This is very strange. They feel like they’re not real. They feel like they’re not mine,’” she said. “It took a little bit to get that connection with them.”
However, the doctors continued to keep the babies around Christie even while she was unconscious in order to establish their connection.
“They could tell that I was their mom,” she said. “They respond to me when I talk to them as opposed to other people.”
Christie and the triplets have since returned home and she feels grateful to have made it through the experience. “It’s rare, but it does happen,” she said. “There were so many miracles that led up to me living instead of dying and we’re grateful.”
