Canadian doctors help critically ill pregnant woman survive and save baby's life
CTV
A pregnant woman with pulmonary hypertension being sustained for weeks on a specialized life support mostly used for COVID-19 patients, all to hold off a necessary lung transplant long enough for a team to deliver her premature baby.
Doctors are saying it’s a world first, and a wild ride for both the family and the team that gathered to see mother and child through it safely.
Earlier this year, 37-year-old Candice Cruise was given an explanation for why she was struggling with an increasingly worsening shortness of breath: she had a disease called pulmonary hypertension.
“I felt that I was dying, and I had two masks on my face just to keep my oxygen up and it wasn't doing anything,” Cruise said. "So that was the scariest.”
It’s a rare disorder in which the blood pressure in the arteries that feeds blood to the lungs and heart becomes dangerously high, putting pressure on the heart. It can be fatal.
