Christmas Eve labor results in death, birth and resurrection
By now, most of you have heard about the woman who died while in labor, C-section was performed, baby was born unresponsive and then, as baby was being resuscitated, mother began breathing again.
Tracy Hermanstorfer, 33, was getting prepped for childbirth at the hospital Thursday morning and her 37-year-old husband was by her side when she began to feel sleepy and laid back in her bed.
(Excuse me,but what does “prepped for childbirth” mean? Is that cover my ass speak for getting an epidural?)
“She literally stopped breathing and her heart stopped,” her husband said. Pandemonium erupted as doctors and nurses tried to revive her with chest compressions and a breathing tube, but nothing worked.
Nobody seems to know why this happened, according to the MSNBC report, but looking into this a bit more deeply, new information emerges and questioning of potentially unnecessary interventions begins. From the research blog, Science and Sensibilities, comes this perspective:
So, according to Dr. Martin, Tracy is an example of how things can go suddenly and horribly wrong for no discernible reason in a healthy woman having a normal labor. All I can say is that Dr. Martin must have slept through the class on epidural complications. Tracy’s story is the classic sequence that follows what anesthesiologists term an “unexpectedly high blockade,” meaning the anesthesiologist injected the epidural anesthetic into the wrong space and it migrated upward, paralyzing breathing muscles and in some cases, stopping the heart. High blockade happens rarely, and even more rarely does it result in full respiratory and cardiac arrest—one database analysis of 11,000 obstetric epidural blocks reported a rate of 1 in 1400 women experiencing a high block and 1 in 5500 requiring intubation, and no woman experienced cardiac arrest. It does happen, though, and I am willing to bet that high blockade and its sequelae happened to Tracy.
If anyone can remember back to my post, Birth, American Style, you will recall that I question the interventions that we take for granted in what is now considered a “normal” hospital birth. One might have made the comment, regarding this situation of, “Thank God she was at the hospital for this birth!” I invite you to review that position:
The moral of the print version would be: have your baby in a hospital where you can be saved should this happen to you. The video interview, however, reveals a different picture. The real moral of the tale is that the safest and healthiest births will be achieved by avoiding medical intervention whenever possible. Induction of labor is by no means always necessary when membranes rupture and certainly not immediately. If Tracy had been allowed to start labor on her own, which, considering that this was not her first baby, she would likely have done within a few hours, she probably wouldn’t have wanted the epidural any more than she did for her first two children.
I am so glad that this story was a drama with a happy ending. It so easily could have been a tragedy.
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amazing…of course no one figures that interventions during labor and childbirth will cause any harm. On the other side…have you ever suggested to a woman that she can actually get through childbirth without the blessed epidural? It seems that in this day and age, labor and child birth without the epidural is unheard of. As you said…thankfully this story had a happy ending. I’m sure there are so many that do not.