Mom, son back from the dead
Mom, son back from the dead
Trillium hospital miracle workers never gave up
By IAN ROBERTSON, Toronto Sun
In the 88 days since she died, Niolys Garcia has never stopped revelling in the miracle of her survival.
She’s now home with her son, Jacob Dariel, who came into the world Aug. 11 barely alive after his mom’s lungs and heart failed during the premature childbirth.
Garcia, 41, treasures the dedication of a medical team that kept refusing to surrender to what twice appeared to be the inevitable.
She began physiotherapy Tuesday back at the Trillium Health Care Centre in Mississauga, determined to get free of her cane and wheelchair.
“Everything is a dream,” Garcia said in the Confederation Parkway-Dundas St. W. area townhouse shared over the past two years with second husband Ariel Collazo, 41, and her daughter, Siurlin Gonzalez Garcia, 20.
Her husband wanted to share their story through the Sun as a way of thanking the doctors and nurses at the Queensway-Hurontario area hospital who saved his wife’s life.
He also wanted to acknowledge the scores of men and women who adopted the family, camping in his wife’s room while she recovered, teaching him to care for their infant son, greeting them in the cafeteria and at the juice counter or dropping by just to say hello, sometimes with hugs.
Even before Garcia’s life and death struggle, the pregnancy was difficult.
Fifteen days before she was admitted to give birth, Garcia showed up at Trillium vomiting and “very weak”. After a brief stay she was sent home.
Then on Aug. 9 a nervous Collazo insisted on taking her back since she appeared to be going into labour a week before her due date.
Garcia has little memory of that day.
“I remember when I came, I filled out the form, but after that I don’t remember anything,” she said.
Taken into a birthing suite the next evening, she seemed to be doing well, “walking the hallway,” nurse Lynne Neil said. But when she began complaining of pain “we were preparing to do an epidural.”
After two hours and 51 minutes, Garcia’s heart failed, Neil said. The woman was resuscitated and breathing tube was inserted.
A “code blue” alarm for the baby also brought an obstetrics team led by Dr. Cathy Cowal, who decided there was no time to lose.
Jacob was just starting to emerge but his mom was unable to push.
Cowal performed an “assisted vacuum delivery” in the birthing suite.
Without removing the baby to reduce pressure on Garcia’s system, it would have been “very hard to save her,” she said.
Since Garcia could not supply her baby with blood and oxygen due to her own heart failure, Jacob was blue, not breathing well and suffering seizures.
The body temperatures of both mother and son were dropped dramatically to avoid brain damage.
Finally breathing properly, Jacob was placed on an intensive care nursery ventilator, then five hours and 41 minutes old, he was transferred to McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton.
Despite more seizures, the baby was stabilized and returned after eight days to Trillium, where staff found his neurological signs normal.
Her son had fought his way back but Garcia’s case took a different deadly trajectory.
After the birth, her condition worsened and one hour and two minutes later, she was wheeled into intensive care where an internist suggested a possible stroke.
With dark blood, “almost like oil” flowing from her nose, mouth and uterus, she needed transfusions until Cowal stemmed the bleeding with a balloon inserted into Garcia’s uterus.
Her heart seized again and anethesiologist Dr. Bill Wong predicted the “likelihood of her living was very remote,” Cowal said.
At 11.37 a.m. she was taken to a cardiac operating room, where for 90 minutes staff performed CPR and repeatedly tried to shock Garcia’s heart back to life.
Consulting with anethesiologists and heart-lung machine operators, Dr. Gopal Bhatnagar decided to use a cardiopulmonary bypass unit, concluding “the alternative was death.”
Cyril Serrick, who operated the unit, said, “normally with anybody with pupils fixed and dilated, you’d be dead.”
Nurses moving at “superhero speed” prepared the machine while the team massaged her heart and lungs to prevent clots after opening her chest.
Garcia’s heart rallied, but with her lungs still faltering, the team finally realized her continuing grave condition was caused by a rare amniotic fluid embolism.
During Jacob’s delivery, the fluid entered her bloodstream through a surgical cut.
“Most doctors see that only once in their career,” Cowal said.
In a rare move, the surgical team hooked Garcia up to an artificial lung normally used for distressed premature newborns.
To everyone’s amazement, barely 20 hours later, she was able to be placed on a standard ventilator.
Due to the swelling of his wife’s body after the first heart attack, Collazo didn’t recognize her. “There was so much blood ....”
He had to alert his stepdaughter, Siurlin, a student born in Cuba before she and her mom emigrated in 1995.
Hospital staff warned them “she might have died,” Collazo said. “It was a nightmare.”
When Garcia awoke at 7.30 p.m. on Aug. 18 after being under heavy sedation for a week, she saw a photo of her newborn put there by the nurses and a sign: “Baby Jacob.”
Confused, she started asking questions.
A bassinet was soon brought in and Garcia had the first of many visits with her son before his discharge Sept. 1 to the care of his dad, sister, grandma and aunt in the family’s Mississauga home.
“Now he’s playing with his hands, he’s so happy,” his proud mom said in the living room after being discharged Oct. 21.
“Thank God they didn’t give up,” she said.
Her mom, Rita Maria Milian, has a word for it — “milagro”.
That’s miracle in their native Cuban language.
ian.robertson@sunmedia.ca