Pregnant 35-year-old Edita Tracey was three weeks shy of her due date; she was at a hair salon when her back began hurting. She called her husband, who was out of town on business, but when the pain moved to the front of her chest and she called 911, reports Fox 29. After emergency workers came to the scene, Tracey says she doesn’t remember anything else.
At the hospital, doctors realized that Tracey’s aorta, the organ that pumps blood to the rest of her body, was ripping apart; they had to operate immediately. She was airlifted to a neighboring hospital where two sets of doctors were waiting to work on her, one for open heart surgery and the other to deliver her baby. This was a high pressure situation of Grey’s Anatomy proportions.
Edita would be in surgery for close to 9 hours. High-risk obstetrician Dr. John Horton’s team went first.
“When they put a mom under full-sleep anesthesia, that medication is now running towards the baby. So, I need to get to the baby as efficiently as possible,” said Dr. John Horton.
Seconds after Tracey went down from the anesthesia, her daughter Arabella was born. Now the surgeons just had to do their part in saving the new mom’s heart, which they did. But it wasn’t easy, as the rupture in her aorta was almost a foot long and doctors had to rebuild the organ.
The next day, Tracey awoke to find a happy and healthy Arabella waiting for her. She is expected to make a complete recovery and doctors think the aorta tear was caused by a blood pressure spike, a condition called eclampsia.