‘I feel like I’m a miracle walking’: Woman wakes from coronavirus coma to learn she’s given birth
Baby Ava still in intensive care
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Your support makes all the difference.A young woman gave birth to her new baby while in a medically-induced coma after she fell ill with coronavirus.
Having complained of symptoms she believed were the result of allergies, Angela Primachenko, from the Washington state city of Vancouver, decided to get tested for the virus.
“Obviously nobody expected that I was going to get that sick, so absolutely I did not expect to deliver my child,” she told NBC’s Today programme, of her arrival at the hospital.
“After all the medication and everything I just woke up and all of a sudden I didn’t have my belly anymore! It was just extremely mind-blowing.”
Ms Primachenko said she began feeling sick March 22. She was 33 weeks pregnant and had no underlying health issues.
After she went to hospital her condition worsened dramatically and she had to be placed on a ventilator. Doctors then put the 27-year-old in a medically-induced coma, as part of the treatment that would also protect her unborn child.
Ms Primachenko was taken off the ventilator on April 6, and realised she had given birth.
While she was released from the Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Centre at the weekend, she had not been able to hold her daughter, Ava, who remains in the facility’s neonatal intensive care unit.
However, she has been able to see her daughter via video chat, and doctors told her the newborn had tested negative for the virus. Her husband and 11-month-old daughter have also been cleared.
She said when she was wheeled out of the intensive care unit in her bed, people began to cheer.
“Everyone did a standing ovation and just clapped me out of the ICU, which is so amazing and such a huge thing to be able to leave the ICU and go to the floor — it’s just the grace of God,“ she said.
“There’s hope. That even in the hardest days and the hardest times that there’s hope and you can rely on God and people and community. The amount of community and people that were praying for me is just unbelievable. I was blown away, and I’m so incredibly thankful.”
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