Covid left a woman on life support, unaware she gave birth. Then came ‘a miracle.’
“Every time a baby cries, I always breathe a sigh of relief,” Crimmins says. “Then there’s the moment when you turn to the parent and say, ‘Your baby is beautiful.’ And obviously in this situation we couldn’t do that.”
She was seeing unvaccinated expectant parents become hospitalized at the beginning of the pandemic and she is still seeing that.
Crimmins is the doctor who delivered Dylan and she describes his family’s experience as “harrowing.”
She recalls the first time she met Maria, who caught the coronavirus last November, before the vaccines became available to the public. Pregnant with her second son, she arrived at the University of Maryland Medical Center from another hospital already intubated with a breathing tube. Crimmins says that because Maria’s lungs were not providing enough oxygen to her and Dylan, she was placed on ECMO, a life-supporting measure that oxygenates the blood outside of the body.
“She was extremely sick and we were using the maximum efforts of our entire team to give her the best chance at survival,” Crimmins says. “There were definitely days where we were very concerned she wasn’t going to survive.”
Wilian says Maria didn’t know she had delivered the baby. She had been in and out of consciousness for more than a month, unaware of much of what was happening around her. She was unaware of how her toddler was spending his days. She was unaware that her newborn shared his older brother’s straight, dark hair. She was unaware that Wilian was trying hard to stay positive, even as he put his savings toward their bills and his days visiting a newborn he worried he might have to raise alone.
He recalls that day Borkowicz saw him cry in the NICU.
“I was thinking, ‘What if she does not survive?’ ” he says. “It would be hard for me because my kids need to see their mommy and a mommy needs to see her baby grow. I was thinking covid is not a game. It can kill people.”
Borkowicz, who was the nurse assigned to care for Dylan, describes what happened next as “a miracle.” She uses that word three times as we talk, sounding in awe with each utterance.
As she tells it, the NICU received a call from the team caring for Maria, asking that a nurse bring Dylan to her room in the intensive care unit. The staff feared she might not survive much longer and wanted the two to have skin-to-skin contact. The staff planned to take photos of the moment for the family, since hospital restrictions at the time limited visitation.
Borkowicz took Dylan that day, and again in the days that followed. Every day, no matter who was on duty, Dylan was brought into his mom’s room and placed against her, so that she could feel him and he could feel her.
During that first visit, Borkowicz says, Maria was awake but not fully conscious. She couldn’t turn her head to look at him.
But within 10 days, she says, Maria was sitting up and feeding her son.
“It’s like her body just knew she needed to fight for her baby,” Borkowicz says. “I honestly have never witnessed anything like that before.”
Before Dylan was discharged from the hospital earlier this year, Borkowicz bought him an outfit with suspenders and a red bow tie for a special event the staff held for him and his parents: a baby shower.
