Mother, baby revived after 'dying' during childbirth

Back from the dead

Tracey Hermanstorfer, 33, was in labour when she suffered a cardiac arrest at the Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs on the Christmas eve.

“I had everything taken away and given back to me in two hours,” new dad Mike Hermanstorfer, 37, was quoted as saying by the New York Post.

While terming the incident as “an absolute miracle”, the Denver truck driver recalled that “everything seemed perfectly normal when, all of a sudden, I noticed her hands turned blue. She was just grey. She looked dead.”

“They tried to resuscitate her for four to five minutes and she was not coming back. They couldn’t get a heartbeat, nothing,” he recounted.

Unable to revive Tracey, doctors focussed on saving the child. “They had to give the baby a fighting chance. So they gave my wife a C-section right there and then and pulled out my son,” Mike said.

“I had seen my wife in front of me gone. I was holding my son, lifeless,” Mike said.
But doctors refused to give up and “did something to (the infant) and boom, he came back to me right in my hands,” the dad said.

Dr Stephanie Martin, director of maternal feotal medicine at Memorial Hospital, said Tracy “was dead, she had no heartbeat, no breathing.

Dr Martin added: “Immediately after delivering him (the baby), her pulse came back.”
Recalling the incident, Tracy said “I guess I went into cardiac arrest and I really don’t remember anything after that.”

The doctors were so sure Tracey had died, they did not administer anaesthesia during C-section. However, doctors continued to work on Tracey till she was revived, but cannot explain why this happened.