When Marisa Christie welcomed triplets in August at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands Medical Center in Houston, she suffered a rare postpartum complication that left her “clinically dead.”
“The doctors pulled all three babies out. They were actually preparing to put them on my stomach to do a slow clamping of the umbilical cord,” Christie told Today. “My arms went up, and that’s when my heart stopped.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, the 30-year-old had an amniotic embolism — a rare condition that occurs when the fluid that surrounds the baby during pregnancy, called amniotic fluid, enters the mother’s bloodstream. Christie was unconscious for a week after her C-section and only learned about the birth of her triplets when she woke up.
“My husband was like, ‘Hey, we had our babies,’” said Christie, who is also the mother of a 4-year-old son. “I was terrified… How could I forget that I had given birth?”
After a week in a coma and meeting her babies Charlotte, Kendall and Collins, Christie said it felt strange. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know these kids. It’s weird. They don’t seem real. They don’t seem like they’re mine,’” she said. “It took me a while to reconnect with them.”
Christie and her husband with their three newborn daughters. Photo: Jennifer Bruse
The three babies were delivered by Christie’s obstetrician, Dr. Amber Samuel, but it was anesthesiologist Ricardo Mora who noticed her having a seizure. Mora had seen another mother suffer an amniotic embolism during childbirth 15 years earlier.
“She was completely gray. I knew something terrible had happened,” Mora told Today. “Amniotic embolism can be pretty devastating. When it happens, the mortality rate is about 80-85%. I asked Dr. Samuel what she did, and she said she just started pulling the placenta out. That’s usually when it happens. The patient stopped breathing. We started CPR because there was no pulse.”
Christie was also put on an ECMO machine by Dr. Stephen Maniscalco, a cardiothoracic and vascular surgeon, to help her body recover.
“She had basically lost all the blood she had. We had to replace the blood. So within 45 minutes, she was clinically dead,” Maniscalco said. “You can do the best CPR in the world, if you don’t get enough blood to the brain, the patient is basically alive but brain damaged. I wanted her to be alive to feed her baby.”
Doctors tried to keep Christie from having to have a hysterectomy, but after the young mother suffered uncontrolled bleeding, they eventually had to do it. Nine weeks later, Christie’s wound had healed and she was discharged from hospital. A week later, her three newborn babies were also sent home.
“I feel very distant from the person I was before,” she said. “I feel like I’ve become stronger, but I’ve also changed a lot because going through such a traumatic experience changes the way you look at things. There are so many miracles that have kept me alive instead of dying, and we’re grateful for all of them.”
