A 32-year-old Texas teacher has surprised medical experts by giving birth after her heart stopped beating and returning to normal life.
Erica Nigrelli was just 36 weeks into her pregnancy when she collapsed in Elkins High School, Missouri City, in March, where she works as an English teacher. Though Nigrelli's heart had stopped beating completely, some of her co-workers and the school nurse managed to bring her back to life through CPR and an electronic defibrillator.
She was later shifted to a local hospital where doctors conducted an emergency C-section to save her daughter Elayna. During the baby's birth, doctors noticed that Nigrelli's heart had again stopped beating.
"The doctors told me that Erica delivered post-mortem because she did not have a heart beat when they took the baby out," Nigrelli's husband Nathan, who is a teacher in the same school, told fortbendstar.com.
After trying awhile, however, the doctors were successful in getting the heart beat back. "But I married a fighter and now I had a baby girl who was a fighter too," Nathan said to fortbendstar.
However, doctors had very little hope of her survival as she was diagnosed with a deadly condition known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). It's a condition where the heart muscle becomes abnormally thick, interfering with its ability to pump blood normally. According to Mayo clinic, the disease is very difficult to diagnose due to lack of any symptoms.
As Nigrelli overcame her dangers, doctors inserted a pacemaker into her collar bone to normalize her heart beat and bring her back to normal life.
"Nine times out of ten most people die from the initial collapse," Nigrelli told Click2Houston.com. "It was literally a ticking time bomb, it just happened when I was 36 weeks pregnant."
At present, her premature baby Elayna, who was kept in NICU for 76 days, is three months old and is fit and fine with a healthy weight of 9 pounds. Both the little girl and her mama have fully recovered from their life threatening conditions and are back home.
