A mother from Texas says she forgot giving birth to triplets after being declared “clinically dead” for 45 minutes. Marisa Christie recalled her experience in the hospital in an interview with Today , where she revealed she suffered a rare post-birth complication. “The doctors had pulled all three [babies] out.
Actually, they were resting them on my stomach to do a delayed cord clamping,” the mother told the publication about her cesarean section. “My arms flew up, and that was when my heart stopped.” Christie experienced an amniotic fluid embolism (AFE).
According to the AFE Foundation , this is a rare condition in which amniotic fluid — the fluid that surrounds a baby in the womb during pregnancy — enters the mother’s bloodstream shortly after birth and the mother has an allergic reaction. Amniotic fluid normally enters the mother’s bloodstream during birth but allergic reactions only occur in 2.5 for every 100,000 births or 1 in 40,000 in the United States.
While the triplets were successfully delivered by her physician, Dr. Amber Samuel, it was Christie’s anesthesiologist Dr. Ricardo Mora who noticed she was seizing and remembered seeing an AFE before.
“It’s pretty catastrophic. When it occurs, it’s about 80 percent, 85 percent fatal,” Mora told Today . “I asked Dr.
Samuel what she had done. She related to me that she had just started pulling the placenta out and that’s usually the time when this occurs — the separation of the placenta .