A woman and her new-born baby astonishingly sprang back to life after “dying” during childbirth at a Colorado hospital in what her tearful husband described as an “absolute miracle.”
Tracey Hermanstorfer, 33, was in labour when she suffered a cardiac arrest at the Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs on Christmas eve.
“I had everything taken away and given back to me in two hours,” new dad Mike Hermanstorfer, 37, was quoted as saying by the New York Post.
While terming the incident “an absolute miracle,” Mr. Hermanstorfer, a Denver truck driver, recalled that “everything seemed perfectly normal when, all of a sudden, I noticed her hands turned blue. She was just grey. She looked dead.
“They tried to resuscitate her for four to five minutes and she was not coming back. They couldn’t get a heartbeat, nothing,” he told the Post.
Unable to revive Ms. Hermanstorfer, doctors focussed on saving the child. “They had to give the baby a fighting chance. So they gave my wife a C-section right there and pulled out my son,” her husband said. “I had seen my wife in front of me gone. I was holding my son, lifeless.”
But doctors refused to give up and “did something to [the infant] and boom, he came back to me right in my hands,” Mr. Hermanstorfer said.
Stephanie Martin, director of maternal foetal medicine at Memorial Hospital, said Ms. Hermanstorfer “was dead, she had no heartbeat, no breathing.”
“She was as grey as her sweatsuit, no signs of life,” Dr. Martin was quoted as saying by KKTV. “Immediately after delivering him [the baby], her pulse came back.”
Recalling the incident, Ms. Hermanstorfer said: “I guess I went into cardiac arrest and I really don’t remember anything after that.”
The Post reported that doctors were so sure she had died that they did not administer anaesthesia during the C-section. Though they continued to work on her till she was revived, the doctors cannot find anything to explain why this happened.
The mother and son, who was named Coltyn, are now home with the couple’s two other boys, the Post said.
“I feel I have been given a second chance,” Ms. Hermanstorfer was quoted as saying. “From now on, nothing will be the same.”
