Nov 10, 2009 6:20 am US/Eastern
MIRACLE: Woman Has Risky Surgery During Childbirth
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
Moms-to-be will do anything to keep their babies out of harm's way, but what if the mother had to undergo emergency heart surgery?
Now, imagine a very pregnant woman having to undergo heart surgery and deliver her baby – at the same time.
It was an extremely rare case, even by major medical center standards, that became an amazing story of survival.
It's the story of a pregnant woman with a heart problem that could kill her in minutes, a medivac helicopter, an obstetrician and a heart team, risky surgery, and two lives hanging in the balance.
Baby showers are happy affairs – a gathering of friends and family celebrating the coming arrival. Julie Simeone was eight months pregnant and cheerfully greeting her guests, getting her home in order.
Then something went wrong.
"I felt a pop in my chest, severe pain, tingling in my neck [and] later in my jaw," Julie said. "I felt like someone kicked me in the mouth. My arms felt weird, my legs, it was all over – mainly in my chest."
The pain soon became so excruciating that Julie had to go to the hospital, where they thought she had a pinched nerve. But her obstetrician suspected something else and convinced Julie to have a CAT scan.
"As soon as we got back to the hospital room, Dr. Seigel came in and said I was having a medical emergency," Julie said. "He had tears in his eyes, nurses were very emotional."
Julie had an aortic dissection – the main artery coming out of her heart, the aorta, was tearing.
"The number one cause of death in patients like this is an acute rupture, and there's not much you can do about that," Dr. Leonard Girardi, of the Perelman Heart Institute at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, said. "From the time your aorta tears to the time you get to an operating room, the mortality is one percent per hour."
A medivac helicopter was the only way to get Julie to the hospital on a summer Sunday evening, because minutes could make the difference between life and death for Julie and her baby.
"I just kept praying, praying, and praying really hard – just 'please, God, let me live' – over and over and over again, and my baby, you know, 'let me and my baby live,'" Julie said. "It was really, really scary, because everyone that looked me in the eye … [I] could just see death on everyone's face."
Within minutes of getting to New York-Presbyterian, Julie was in surgery, but first doctors had to deliver her baby. Labor could have been fatal, so they had to deliver the child by Caesarean section. At the same time, Dr. Girardi was opening her chest – he had to cut out the torn portion of her aorta and replace it with a Dacron graft.
It was only when she woke up in intensive care that Julie realized that both she and little Maxwell had both survived.
"It was really good," Julie said. "It was a miracle."
But it was almost a week before she got to hold baby Max for the first time in the neonatal intensive care unit.
"It was awful not to hold him – I got to see him a day later, but I couldn't hold him for six days," Julie said. "That was hell.
"Everyday is a gift. You know, I'm just very grateful," Julie said. "I have this beautiful baby I get to see every day."
Both Julie and Max are doing well, and the New York Yankees have a new fan.
It's been nearly six months since Julie's brush with death. Dr. Girardi says she'll have to be monitored closely for blood pressure and other tears, but that her prognosis is excellent.
Meanwhile, in addition to Dr. Girardi and the whole team at New York-Presbyterian, Julie says she also owes her life to her obstetrician, Dr. Mark Seigel in Freehold, New Jersey, who didn't like the pinched nerve diagnosis and insisted on the CAT scan that found the aortic tear.
But he won't be delivering any more babies for Julie – another pregnancy would be too dangerous.
A few diseases can lead to Julie's condition, most of them genetic.
It turns out that Julie's father had died suddenly years ago of what she thought was a heart attack, but was likely a ruptured aorta, so it's possible that Julie has some sort of genetic connective tissue weakness that led to the aortic dissection.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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