HOW THE KIDS NEARLY LOST MUM
Karenwantstothanktheblooddonorswhosavedherlife
Having just welcomed her much-wanted third child, Karen Thorn was looking forward to a postbaby break – the cherry on top of what was supposed to be a blissful time of nesting. But then a dire turn of events left her seconds from death, her life depending on the blood of strangers.
It’s something never far from the Wellington woman’s mind – the dream start to 2015 that was shattered by a rare and undiagnosed nearfatal complication days after her little girl was born.
Karen, 38, explains that she thought a brief luxury getaway with baby Cassidy would be the perfect way to celebrate the latest addition to the family.
“Because it was my third baby, I quickly returned home and went off a week later for our babymoon,” recalls the Victoria University PHD student, who is also mum to Arthur, 11, and 10-year-old Leonard.
Horrordiscovery
Karen was just over an hour away from the capital, holidaying in Martinborough, when the break took a turn for the worse. The new mum woke in the middle of the night to discover golf ball-sized clots of blood on her maternity pad.
Haemorrhaging while 80km from home, Karen was rushed to hospital, the post-natal bleeding suspected to have been caused by an infection.
But despite intravenous antibiotics, the blood loss continued unabated for the next 18 hours, with the holiday now well and truly derailed.
Telling her story for the first time after hearing a radio plea by the New Zealand Blood Service for donors, Karen recalls lying in her hospital bed, chatting to her mum and sister, when a nurse noticed her heart rate was unusually fast.
Pegging it to anxiety, the nurse said, “Relax, just relax.” Karen recalls, “I replied, ‘I’m perfectly relaxed,’ and she looked me in the eye for two seconds, then screamed, ‘Get the blood, get the blood!’”
At first, Karen had no idea her life hung in the balance. “All hell broke loose. I remember lying there, with my sister and mother just staring at me.”
During her recovery, Karen discovered this was the moment that she’d been perilously close to taking her last breath. She had been bleeding to death because a section of placenta had failed to naturally flush out of her uterus after Cassidy’s birth.
It was only when her body became boiling hot and her heart went into overdrive,