“I still grieve what I thought my birth experience would be. I wasn’t even technically alive when my baby was born. And now I’ll never have another pregnancy. I’ll grieve that for the rest of my life.”
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Kayleigh Summers was screaming. That’s not so unusual for a woman who is 10 centimeters dilated in a hospital delivery room. But this was different.
“I started yelling, ‘Something is wrong. Something is wrong with my heart,’” says Summers, a Voorhees native. That’s when her heart stopped beating. Just moments before, the nurse was smiling, asking if she and her husband were excited to meet their baby. Then the nurse was calling a Code Blue for Room 231.
Doctors rushed her to the OR, and 6 minutes later, her son, Callahan, was born. While half of the room focused on resuscitating him, the other half worked on Summers. She was down for 9 minutes before she was revived. Then she started bleeding uncontrollably. After receiving 143 units of blood (the average person holds 10 units of ...