# @sjmagmedia on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd6KAFTBFQR
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/177310-sjmagmedia-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/ba2ce01c7f.jpg
- **Posted:** 2022-05-23T17:19:15.000+00:00

## Caption

“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.”
***

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 blood in their body), she coded again.

Doctors put Summers on the highest form of life support while working to stabilize her. She underwent a hysterectomy to stop the bleeding. She was given a heart pump to maintain blood flow. Two days later, Summers finally came off life support.

Or, at least, all of this is the story she was told. She remembers getting her nails done days before the delivery. The next thing she knew, she was in the Cardiothoracic ICU with her OB/GYN and anesthesiologist sitting on either side of her bed, holding her hands. Her son wasn’t there, and after more than an hour of listening to the events of the last few days, she understood why.

Summers suffered from an amniotic fluid embolism, an extremely rare and often fatal occurrence that happens without warning in only 1 in 50,000 births. Summers and her son Callahan, now 2, are both happy and healthy. But the experience still lingers. She started sharing her story publicly – first on Instagram, then later on TikTok under the handle @thebirthtrauma_mama – in January 2020.

What happens when giving birth goes from beautiful to traumatic? Read the full story at our Link in Bio.
#southjersey #birthtrauma

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## Credits

| Name | Username | Profile | Role |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| SJ Magazine | @Justsaysj | https://gondola.cc/Justsaysj | Magazine |
| Elyse Notarianni | @ElyseNotarianni | https://gondola.cc/ElyseNotarianni | Social Media Manager |

## Tags

southjersey, birthtrauma

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