Giving birth to my girl literally broke my heart, but now we are loving life
EVERY moment of motherhood is precious but especially so for Kimberley McAllister – after being pregnant literally broke her heart.
Expecting her first baby, the 30-year-old suffered a complication in which her blood pressure rose so high it tore the main artery pumping blood from her heart around her body.
She had an emergency caesarean section which resulted in her daughter being delivered seven weeks early. After surgery to repair her heart, the new mum was put in a coma for 20 days, kept alive with a heart and lung bypass machine.
The agonising ordeal, which has left her paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair, has made her life with daughter Rylee feel even more precious.
Mrs McAllister, from Aberdeen, said: ‘It’s been a big life change but it makes you appreciate things more. I miss certain things, especially not being able to run around with Rylee. But it could have been a lot worse. I might not have survived.’
Against all the odds she was able to see Rylee, now four, start primary school – an ‘emotional’ day.
The drama began in the latter stages of Mrs McAllister’s pregnancy when she woke up with excruciating pain between her shoulder blades.
Her husband Sean drove her to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary where scans showed she had a tear in her lower aorta. The life-threatening condition occurs in only one in 250,000 pregnancies.
Similar to a heart attack or stroke, symptoms can include sudden chest or upper back pain, severe stomach pain, shortness of breath, vision problems, difficulty speaking and paralysis.
Rylee was immediately delivered by caesarean but surgery to repair Mrs McAllister’s heart was considered so risky that doctors decided to treat her with medication to keep her blood pressure low and stop the tear getting bigger. For two years she was able to be at home enjoying time with her daughter, but in 2019 it was decided the time was right for surgery.
In December that year her torn aorta was repaired with a synthetic patch at Hammersmith Hospital in London. Because of lockdowns, she had almost no contact with her family for a year.
She said: ‘That was the hardest thing – not getting hugs. I still feel like I missed a year of Rylee’s life. But it could have been a lot more.’
During the 14-hour operation, her lung collapsed and she needed blood transfusions. She then had to be rushed to London’s Royal Brompton Hospital 30 minutes after the operation, where she was put on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine.
Surgeons also made the drastic decision to remove both her kidneys and spleen.
She said: ‘It wasn’t that they weren’t working – they had doubled in size and were squashing the other organs. I only had a 30 per cent chance of surviving the second operation but they had no choice.’
Mrs McAllister is on dialysis three days a week and is waiting to be placed on the transplant list. The family has also moved to a new home that has been adapted to cater for her needs.
She said: ‘I’m not letting it hold me back. We even slept in a tent. Rylee said she wanted to, so we did. It wasn’t easy but it was doable. It makes you appreciate life – and we’re making plenty of memories.’
‘The hardest thing was not getting hugs’