What should have been one of the happiest moments of a couple’s lives quickly turned into an unimaginable medical nightmare.
Nicole and Anthony were thrilled to be welcoming their third baby when Nicole began documenting the moment for her unborn child.
“Hey baby number three. We’re in the hospital,” said Nicole in a video she was recording. “Can’t wait to see you.”
Not long after, Nicole began to feel nauseous and hot, she recalls in an exclusive clip from tonight’s new episode of TLC reality medical series “ER: Caught On Camera,” airing at 9 pm.
“I felt an overwhelming sense of doom just come over my body,” she said. “I remember saying I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. And, and that was the last thing I remember.”
Just 10 minutes after recording the video, Nicole suddenly and mysteriously flatlined while in labor on the delivery table and was quickly pronounced her dead.
Anthony recalled a nurse immediately beginning chest compressions.
“And I just said, ‘What the hell just happened to my wife,’” he said. “That’s when they said, ‘Your wife has coded. She’s technically expired.’”
Determined to save their baby, doctors rushed Nicole to the operating room and performed a postmortem C-section. Anthony was left frozen in the delivery room, petrified at the possibility of becoming a single dad — a thought that had never crossed his mind before.
But doctors weren’t just fighting to save the baby. They were also working to bring Nicole back to life.
Seven minutes into the code blue — the most critical hospital emergency indicating that a patient is in cardiac or respiratory arrest — Nicole’s pulse returned.
But her fight was far from over.
Nicole had suffered a massive hemorrhage. Dr. Erin Nance, a board-certified surgeon, explained that severe bleeding can occur when the uterus fails to contract after childbirth, especially following a cesarean section, allowing blood loss to continue.
To stop the bleeding and save her life, doctors removed Nicole’s uterus.
“The main place that Nicole was bleeding out into was into her uterus,” said Dr. J Mack Slaughter, an emergency physician. “So you take that out and you were able to cauterize all the other blood vessels in the area.”
Nicole was discharged from the hospital a week following her near-death delivery.
“It has made me change how I love and how I forgive and how I want this new life that I was given back,” said Nicole.
Doctors later determined that Nicole’s cardiac arrest was caused by an amniotic fluid embolism, a rare and potentially fatal childbirth complication.
The condition occurs when amniotic fluid or fetal material enters the mother’s blood stream and triggers a catastrophic reaction. It can lead to heart and lung failure, excessive bleeding, cardiac arrest, brain damage and death.
A 2022 study of 14.6 million people who gave birth between 2016 and 2019 found that amniotic fluid embolism occurred in 6 out of 100,000 deliveries.
While rare, amniotic fluid embolism is the leading cause of peripartum heart attack in the US and the second most common cause of peripartum maternal death.
The condition can be difficult to diagnose because its symptoms — including shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, a sudden drop in blood pressure, fluid in the lungs, fetal distress and an abnormal heart rate — can resemble those of other serious pregnancy and childbirth complications.
Its exact cause remains unknown.
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