Pregnant Mom Spends 139 Days In Hospital Battling COVID-19; Suffers 3 Strokes, Heart Attack

A pregnant Texas woman hospitalized for the coronavirus suffered a collapsed lung, several strokes and a heart attack before ultimately giving birth to a baby boy — a feat her doctor said was a "miracle."

Diana Crouch, 28, was brought to Texas Children's Hospital in Houston after testing positive for COVID-19 on Aug. 4. She was told she had coronavirus-induced pneumonia, ABC13 reported.

The then-unvaccinated mother of two from Kingwood was 18 weeks into her pregnancy when she was put on a ventilator and sedated on Aug. 10, added the outlet.

Dr. Cameron Dezfulian, the medical director of adult congenital heart inpatient care at Texas Children's Hospital, decided to put Crouch on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) — a medical technique that involved pumping blood out of a patient's body, running it through an artificial lung, filling it with oxygen, taking off some of the carbon dioxide and returning the blood to the body.

It was the last resort to get Crouch's baby to a viable stage of pregnancy, Dezfulian said.

Crouch suffered three strokes on the same day, and she also had a heart attack and seizures when she was 25 weeks pregnant.

One of Crouch's lungs later collapsed, prompting doctors to perform an emergency cesarean section on her 31 weeks into her pregnancy and far from her original due date of Jan. 9.

The mother reunited with her newborn son three days after the operation, and her ventilator was removed after another ten days

Crouch was then transferred to Methodist Hospital in Houston, where she was supposed to be evaluated for a possible lung transplant. However, it was determined that she did not need one.

After spending a total of 139 days in the hospital, Crouch was discharged on Dec. 23. She was still on oxygen on an as-needed basis, and she needed to go to physical and occupational therapies, but Dezfulian said she was likely to make a full recovery.

"It's only been a couple of years since the pandemic started, so the long term we don't know because there hasn't been a long term yet, but she has made tremendous progress," Dezfulian said.

Crouch and her husband, Chris, have named their child Cameron, after the doctor.

"It's never happened before. When they told me, I was in tears. It's such an honor. I told them I said I don't deserve this. I consider this one of a handful of miracles," Dezfulian said.

Diana is one of seven expectant mothers in the country and one of about 12 in the world to have sustained their pregnancies while on ECMO, according to Dezfulian, who called Diana's case "exceptional."

Both Diana and Chris were unvaccinated at the time the former contracted COVID-19 because she believed the vaccine would not be good during her pregnancy, Chris said. They have since been jabbed.

"[A]ll of this could have been avoided if she was vaccinated," Chris said while quoting what Dezfulian told them.

"Pregnancy seems to make the risk higher and many of them are not vaccinating because they aren't going to take a new mRNA vaccine. I understand the rationality behind that, but the risk from COVID is high," Dezfulian said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been recommending people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, currently trying to get pregnant, or might become pregnant in the future to get vaccinated.

"The growing body of evidence about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy suggests that the benefits of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine outweigh any known or potential risks of vaccination during pregnancy," the agency said.

The United States has reported a total of 75,302,383 coronavirus cases and 888,784 deaths, according to data provided by the CDC.