New Mom Survives the Unthinkable and Returns to the ICU That Saved Her
Everything about her pregnancy had been going normally for TriHealth maternity patient Ashley Zinn, from pre-natal care all the way through labor to a successful delivery. Following the delivery, however, she complained to her physician, Dr. Lindsey Crawford, about chest pains. This would be the last thing Ashley remembered before waking up more than a week later to mixed expressions of worry and relief from her loved ones.
“I had a very normal, healthy pregnancy… Everything went great during the actual delivery,” Ashley remembers.
“Then about 30 minutes after birth, I started complaining about chest pains… my oxygen was plummeting and I was being rushed to the ICU.”
Ashley’s care team acted quick to get her the care she needed as she was experiencing multiple organ failure, starting with her lungs and quickly progressing to her heart, kidneys and to the rest of her body.
“What I had was an amniotic fluid embolism which is very rare, about 1 in 40,000, and is diagnosed by exclusion,” Ashley shares about the condition she became forced to acquaint herself with. “So they had to pretty much go through a list of everything they thought was going wrong, and once they got to the end of that list… that’s when they go ahead and diagnose you with that [Amniotic Fluid Embolism].”
Everything else that Ashely knows about the next ten or so days of her life after that is secondhand, told to her by her family and care team.
“The next thing my husband and family was told is that even on a ventilator, I wasn’t going to make it,” Ashley relays from her loved ones. “They said I only had probably about an hour or two to live, and the only other option for me to have a fighting chance was to put me on ECMO.”
ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, is a form of life support that uses an outside-the-body pump to support the heart and lungs by performing their functions mechanically, allowing a patient’s heart and lungs to rest as blood temporarily bypasses them.
Ashley’s family opted to go with whatever procedure might save her, even if it was a long shot. After a successful two-and-a-half-hour surgery, they were told it was just going to be a waiting game to see if Ashley’s organs would recover and she would wake up.
“The next thing I remember is waking up a week and a half later.” She also recalls of that moment, “my dad was standing in front of me and he was crying… they all just kind of rushed in the room.”
Ashley remembers being a little confused at first. “I remember looking at my dad and I was just like ‘What happened?’ Like I knew I had just given birth… I was terrified something had happened to him.” She also wanted to know why her chest hurt so bad.
Ashley’s father proceeded to fill her in on the previous ten days, and she couldn’t believe it at first. After getting the full explanation of her diagnosis from Dr. Crawford and grasping that there is no cure for the condition that caused it, Ashley was just happy to be at a hospital where ECMO technology was readily available.
“That’s truly what saved me, the CVICU having those capabilities and the seriousness [with which] my OB took my complaints,” she says.
When she woke up, Ashley was engaged in not just the mental battle of learning about the last week and a half, but also an intense physical battle.
“Woke up not knowing how to move my hands… I couldn’t even hold my child,” she says of the first few days after coming to. “I had to learn how to walk again, how to talk and had a really, really hard time reading as well. I pretty much had to teach myself how to re-read.”
After about six months of immense effort and inspiring perseverance, Ashley made it out of the woods and was fully cleared by her cardiac and OB-GYN teams with no lasting issues. She is also extremely grateful that her son was born completely healthy despite the complications she endured.
Returning to the Scene of the Care
Ashley’s mental and physical recovery was not the only journey she went on in the months following her medical complications. Prior to giving birth, Ashley was a student at the Good Samaritan College of Nursing & Health Science. After re-learning to walk, talk and read, Ashley re-enrolled and picked up where she had left off—eventually getting to work on the very same team with the very same tech that saved her life.
“When all of this happened is when it really hit me that I feel like ECMO is my calling,” she says with a look of pride. “The nurse that ran my ECMO… I’m really good friends with her to this day.”
After everything, Ashley thinks it gives her a unique ability to relate to her patients.
“I think that having gone through something so awful but having such an amazing outcome at the same time, definitely helps me treat patients,” she says. “I can understand what they’re going through. I am made to be in the CVICU.”