Mom with COVID-19 bonds with newborn using recorded heartbeats.
Music therapist uses recorded heartbeats, songs to bond newborn and quarantined mom who gave birth unconscious
For 35 weeks, Selina Herrera lived just inches from her mother’s heartbeat, thub-dubbing above her in a peaceful, reassuring rhythm.
Then came the diagnosis: Emelia Herrera, a 30-year-old from Cypress, 35 weeks pregnant with her second daughter, tested positive for COVID-19. On April 8, Emilia’s symptoms grew so severe that she couldn’t breathe. She could barely even speak when she reached the Houston Methodist Willowbrook Hospital.
“They didn’t even put me in the waiting room,” she says. “They took me straight to a room and started giving me oxygen. And I basically blacked out after that.”
When she awoke, three weeks later, unsure of where she was and unable to move, Emelia felt the absence of her baby bump immediately. She had no memory of giving birth, but she soon learned that she’d delivered little Selina during an emergency C-section the day she was admitted.
On Saturday, one day before Mother’s Day and a day after Selina’s one-month birthday, Emelia was finally released to meet her little girl.
She pulled Selina in close, and held her to her chest, careful not to squeeze too hard. And there, both mother and daughter had a chance to listen to the sounds they’d learned by heart these past weeks.
At Houston Methodist’s main campus, where Emelia had been transported during her illness, a therapist had an idea early on in Emelia’s stay: What if she could make Emelia and Selina feel as though they were once again listening to heartbeats together?
“I wanted to help her bond with her baby,” says music therapist Virginia Gray. “And I told her
I’d like to record your heartbeat, and use that beat as the base to a song for a baby. Because the baby will know your heartbeat. She’ll know your voice.”
“Yes,” Emelia answered her. “She knows my heartbeat.”
Gray used a special stethoscope to record Emelia’s heartbeat, and asked if the young mother would like to sing the words to a lullaby. But Emelia’s voice was shot, after weeks of intubation and being hooked up to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, which operates like an external lunch.
“Can you sing it?” she asked Gray.
Gray obliged, singing the wellknown words, “Twinkle, twinkle little star,” over Emelia’s heartbeat. At the very end of the song, Emelia added “I love you Selina,” words she hoped her daughter would remember her whispering while she was in-utero. The team at Methodist then dropped the recording into a stuffed heart, similar to the ones used at the toy shop Build-A-Bear, and delivered it to Emelia’s mother, who has been watching Selina and her 3-year-old sister until their mother is discharged.
It sits in Selina’s crib.
“It’s made me feel a lot better,” Emelia said last week, from her hospital bed. “I felt like my daughter was missing out on me. So it meant a lot that she could have my heartbeat next to her, since she was in my stomach for so long.”
Heartbeats are, of course, chock full of symbolism about love and a steady hand. But there’s more to this gesture. There’s science behind it, too.
Studies show that hearing a mother’s heartbeat can have a calming effect on infants, and can even reduce their stress hormones.
“The sound of the mother’s voice and heartbeat reduces the anxiety that an infant experiences,” says Dr. Ben Weinstein, chair psychiatry at Methodist. And that stress reduction goes more than just one way.
“For a parent to hear the sound of a child’s heartbeat,
that’s a really special thing too,” he says. “If you’re a parent, you know that. When mothers go to their ultrasound appointments, they looked forward to hearing their baby’s heartbeat. It’s a symbol of life.”
Gray, and Emelia’s husband, Erick Herrera – whom she hadn’t seen since her intake, due to quarantine requirements – wanted Emelia to experience this. So they used that special stethoscope again, this time recording Selina’s heartbeat. For this gift, Gray paired the heartbeat with the song that Emelia had walked down the aisle to at her wedding.
“Darling, don't be afraid, I have loved you for a thousand years,” Gray sang along to Emelia’s cherished song, by Christine Perri. “I'll love you for a thousand more.”
Gray eventually recorded a third song, which syncs up the heartbeats of Selina, Erick and Emelia.
“The goal was to help mom bond, and to use the music to give her opportunities for processing, in a safe and organized way, the trauma she’s experienced in the journey of being in the hospital,” Gray says. And to her eyes, it’s worked.
“Each time she touches this story, it’s less traumatic,” the music therapist says. “At first, she couldn’t talk about it without becoming short of breath or tearful. She’s getting better now.”
Emelia still has a long road to recovery. She needs rehabilitation to help with the lingering side effects both of the coronavirus, and of being sedated for so long. There is nerve damage, and she can’t yet move one of her feet.
“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” the stay-athome mom said last week.
But she listened to the heartbeat. It helped her feel closer to the daughter she’d only seen through video screens.
On Saturday, Emelia couldn’t contain her tears when her mother handed her Selina, clad in an elephants-and-bears onesie. She pulled the baby close. And cried.
“After such a long journey,” she said, “I’m home.”