A young mother who won the battle against COVID-19 after delivering her baby while in a coma is spending Mother's Day at home.
Blanca was admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) at UC San Diego Health in late March after testing positive for COVID-19. Because she could barely breathe, she needed to be intubated, according to Michelle Brubaker from UC San Diego Health.
As Blanca was in a coma doctors made the decision to deliver her baby via an emergency cesarean section.
“Before we went into the main operating room because of how sick she was, we did a huge debrief with the ICU team, the Operating Room team, the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) team,” said Zerrin Hill, a clinical nurse at UC San Diego Health. “We all came together because this was just a huge case between mom and baby because of the unknown between the two of them, trying to figure out how they could safely get this baby out and get the mom safely recovered post-partum.”
Blanca’s baby, who was named Atziri, was born at 32 weeks gestation weighing only 4 pounds and 4.6 ounces. She was healthy and tested negative for COVID-19, Brubaker said.
When Blanca awoke from a coma nearly a month later, she learned she had delivered her daughter.
Local
“She woke up and said, ‘No, my baby is in here’ and pointed at her stomach. The doctor told her, ‘No, we delivered your baby and she’s in the NICU,” Hill said.
A few days before Mother’s Day, Atziri and Blanca were discharged from the NICU and are spending Mother's Day together.
“I want to thank the entire medical team, nurses and doctors, for the great work they have done in helping my Atziri – my baby – when she needed me the most and I couldn’t be there for her,” Blanca said. “Also, thank you very much to all the medical teams researching and working on this disease since it began to appear. Thanks to all of you I’m a survivor of COVID.”
