Nicole was recording a video for her third baby when everything changed in seconds.
“I feel like I can’t breathe”, she managed to say. Ten minutes later, on the delivery table, her heart stopped completely. A nurse began compressions while a doctor explained to Anthony, her husband, that his wife had technically expired. With Nicole’s body clinically lifeless, the medical team made an extreme decision: to perform a postmortem C-section in an attempt to save the baby while they continued fighting to revive her.
Seven minutes into the code blue, her pulse returned. But the bleeding would not stop: massive hemorrhaging forced doctors to remove her uterus to cauterize the vessels and stop the blood loss. The cause, they later determined, was an amniotic fluid embolism, a complication that occurs in just 6 out of every 100,000 births and that doctors still cannot fully explain to this day.
