Mum in labour ‘died’ for 11mins ... then couldn’t remember birth when she woke
A MOTHER who was technically dead for 11 minutes during her son’s birth woke up four days later with no memory of being pregnant – or having her baby.
Hilary Wilson’s heart stopped during a caesarean section and doctors gave her only a 30 per cent chance of survival.
She was on life support for several days afterwards and even though she pulled through, she was warned of an 85 per cent possibility that she could be brain damaged.
Reunited with her healthy new baby Felix a few days after her ordeal, she struggled to accept the little boy was hers.
‘My friends and family would talk to me about Felix, but I had no idea what they were on about,’ she recalled. ‘I had no idea that I’d ever been pregnant or just had a baby.’
Mrs Wilson, 41, has now made a complete recovery and has a normal relationship with Felix – who is nine months old. But it has taken time.
When she awoke four days after the birth in intensive care, family and friends showed her photographs of Felix, but she remained unable to recall anything.
It was only when she saw a picture of her new baby wearing her older children’s hand-me- downs that she realised he was her son.
Mrs Wilson, a translator from Whitchurch, Shropshire, and husband Barry have two older boys, Sebastian, six, and Lucas, four.
She said: ‘They had both worn a white baby grow with blue piping when newborns, and Felix was wearing it in the picture – so I thought he must have been mine.’
She added: ‘Slowly vague memories of being pregnant and giving birth returned, and I started to feel the instinct to look after him.
‘Now I’m completely bonded with Felix, and he’s a perfectly healthy, smiley little baby.’
Mrs Wilson had an amniotic fluid embolism – a condition caused by amniotic fluid, or other matter from the foetus, getting into the mother’s bloodstream. It can lead to seizures, coma, and cardiac arrest. She had been in labour for 12 hours last July at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital when doctors decided to perform a caesarean section.
Just as Felix was being lifted out of the womb, she went into cardiac arrest. She said: ‘They did CPR on me for 11 minutes and I had adrenaline injected into my heart.
‘I lost four fifths of my blood because they hadn’t f i nished the c-section.’