Mother had near-death experience battling COVID-19 while pregnant
A Kentucky mother is thanking doctors after she spent over a month on life support following a COVID-19 infection.
Thirty-three-year-old Michaela Dailey, was 33 weeks pregnant when she said she was admitted to an area hospital with her mother after contracting COVID-19.
"I was healthy," Dailey said. "I was 33. Would I have thought COVID would put me in the hospital, almost take a lung from me? No. I was 33 weeks pregnant, already knew I had COVID. They rushed me to the back, the last thing I remember is them saying, 'We're calling your doctor we have to take the baby,' and then I woke up at UofL Health a month later."
Dailey described the month as a dream but it was very much reality for doctors.
"She was at the point where the ventilator was pushing as hard as it could and she wasn't oxygenating well enough. And the way she was progressing, I think within a day or two she probably would've passed away," Dr. Victor Van Berkel said.
Van Berkel said that's when Hardin Memorial doctors called saying, "She is at a point where we can't do... we're not oxygenating her well enough with the ventilator and otherwise she's a healthy young woman who just had a baby and we need to do everything we can for her."
Van Berkel said he and other staff members went to the hospital and put Dailey on ECMO, a form of life support, before transferring her to a different hospital where she clung to life for weeks before waking up and realizing life wasn't the same.
"The hardest part was waking up and I couldn't speak and I had all these tubes on me and I had no idea what was going on, so I was really just confused because the last thing I remember is where's my baby, but then I looked up at the wall and there was pictures of her so I knew she had been born," Dailey said.
Dailey was discharged on Oct. 2 and began rehab. She finished her pulmonary rehab Monday.
"They build your strength and your knowledge to help build you back to your normal self," Dailey said.
Dailey said she feels 95% back to her normal self now and though she wasn't vaccinated when she first tested positive, she and her entire family now have all of their vaccines.
