Mother And Baby Survive Near Death Experience

[MA-Caver]

Mother and baby survive near-death experiences

By Stephanie Smith, CNN Medical Producer
January 5, 2010 9:34 a.m. EST


http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/05/mother.baby.revived/index.html?iref=allsearch(CNN) -- The nightmare began around 12:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve.
Mike Hermanstorfer stood next to his wife's hospital bed, stricken. He touched her arm. The skin was cold, ashen. Tracy Hermanstorfer's heart had stopped.
"I opened my hand and her arm just fell out of mine," said Hermanstorfer. "She was already gone."
Moments later, the staff at Memorial Health System in Colorado Springs, Colorado, sounded a Code Blue -- resuscitation needed for cardiac arrest. They would have to act fast: Tracy Hermanstorfer, 33, was also in labor. Her baby was perilously close to death.
But this was a perplexing case. Before her heart stopped beating, Tracy Hermanstorfer was, by all accounts, completely healthy. Doctors still have few clues about what caused her cardiac arrest.
"The risk of a woman dying in the course of trying to carry a pregnancy is an incredibly rare event," said Dr. Michael Greene, director of obstetrics at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved with Hermanstorfer's case. "The number of things that can cause this in an otherwise healthy woman is a very short list."
Greene says that only around eight in 100,000 women die during childbirth in the United States.

This story while bizarre has a happy ending.... Glad that the other children won't have to remember Christmas as the day their mom died (permanently).
Wonders if the mother remembers anything during her death?