SAVED BY HER BABY
Ma’s heart woe found after birth
Yulia Nurikyan woke up around 5 a.m. on a Sunday in mid-May with a heavy feeling in her throat.
Moments later, Nurikyan, 38 weeks pregnant with her first child, fainted and fell to the floor. Her husband called an ambulance, and she was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital Center.
Baby girl Livia was born later that morning — and within 24 hours Nurikyan was undergoing complex heart surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital for a deadly condition she didn’t even know she had until after she delivered her daughter.
“I never showed any signs of this,” Nurikyan, 33, of Astoria, told the Daily News. “I was scared, I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Nurikyan had an aortic dissection — a tear in the wall of the valve where blood can seep through, accumulate around the heart and cause sudden death.
“In the world of cardiac surgery, it’s at the top of the list of emergencies,” said Dr. Ismail El-Hamamsy, director of aortic surgery at Mount Sinai, who has performed the highly specialized procedure.
“We could see there was a malformation in her aortic valve,” he said. “It was ready to rupture any minute.”
Nurikyan had a bicuspid aortic valve, a heart defect where about half of patients will have an aortic aneurysm, or an abnormal enlargement of the vessel that predisposes people to tears and ruptures,
El-Hamamsy said. There are few or no symptoms in the majority of patients.
During the coronavirus crisis in New York, there was a 77% decline in these cases at area hospitals since many people opted to stay at home rather than seek medical attention for any symptoms that weren’t associated with COVID-19, a new study shows.
“She might’ve said, ‘Let’s just wait it out and see what happens,’ ” said El-Hamamsy, one of the authors of the study. “She might’ve died at home.”
Nurikyan, who delivered Livia at 9:35 a.m. on May 17 by Caesarean section, told doctors that same day her father had died from an aortic dissection — a crucial clue to her diagnosis. They ran a CT scan and a number of other tests before taking her to Mount Sinai.
Livia — who was in the neonatal intensive care unit due to fluid filling one of her lungs — had to stay behind at Elmhurst because of COVID-19.
“For about five minutes I got to hold her — then I had to leave,” Nurikyan said. “I was crying, I didn’t want to leave her.”
As she recovered from the grueling procedures, Nurikyan could also not be with her husband, Antoan, due to coronavirus. When he was finally permitted inside her hospital room, he FaceTimed a nurse at Elmhurst so that Nurikyan could see little Livia.
Mom and daughter were both discharged May 23. Nurikyan will see genetic cardiologists at Mount Sinai to better explain her aortic disease and determine whether Livia will need genetic testing, too.
“When I think about what I’ve gone through, all of the (difficult) things that came before it…none of it was worth being stressed about,” she said. “The day I saw [Livia] again, it felt like I waited thousands of years for that moment.”
“My baby is the one that got me through it,” she added. “I thought, ‘I have to get out of here, I have to see my baby.’ This was for her.”