Mom suffers cardiac arrest 45 minutes after childbirth: The story of a rare medical emergency and a woman’s miraculous recovery

Chelsea Cheveria was having the best moment of her life. Her second child, a daughter named Zairah, had just arrived on February 10th, 5 pounds, 2 ounces of healthy newborn. Her husband Scott kissed her. She kissed her baby's cheek. "She was a perfect little tiny nugget," Chelsea told People. Then he texted the family group chat: mom and baby doing great.

Forty-five minutes later, everything stopped.

When everything changed in an instant

Chelsea was in the operating room getting closed up from her scheduled cesarean section when it happened. "My eyes rolled into the back of my head," she says, "and Scott said, 'Something's not right.' And then I was non-responsive." The last thing she remembers is black.

What happened next was the kind of medical emergency that most people only see on TV dramas. Chelsea went into cardiac arrest. Scott was asked to leave the room while a nurse told him to pray. Minutes later, he got the news every parent dreads: his wife had a 50-50 chance of survival.

According to reporting from People, the medical team sprang into action. Dr. Robbye McNair was holding Chelsea's aorta, trying to control the bleeding. Doctors performed four rounds of CPR. They got her on a ventilator. They prepped an ECMO machine, a heart-lung machine, in case they needed to keep her alive artificially while they figured out what was happening.

"If they hadn't responded so swiftly to resuscitate her," says Dr. Keith Benzuly, the interventional cardiologist who was called in immediately, "she might have died."

A rare medical crisis

The diagnosis came back: pulmonary embolism. Two large blood clots were sitting in her lungs, blocking blood from reaching her heart. "This is an uncommon thing—it's one in a thousand, or less," Benzuly told People.

He gave her blood thinners to break down the clots, then performed a pulmonary thrombectomy to physically remove them. It worked. Chelsea survived a medical event that kills plenty of people who don't get that kind of immediate intervention.

When Chelsea woke up the next morning in the ICU, she was terrified. There was a tube down her throat. Machines beeped everywhere. She had broken ribs and a broken sternum from the CPR. But Scott was sitting in the chair beside her, and he told her Zairah was healthy, waiting in the nursery.

She held her newborn. "It was magic," she says. "I told my girlfriends it was the best pain reliever."

Now home with both her daughters, she also has a 4-year-old named Annayiah, Chelsea is still processing what happened. Her mom, actress Jane McCreedy, puts it plainly: "It reminds you that childbirth is dangerous. We think it's so routine in this country, and for most of us, it is. But it can be very, very dangerous."

Still, Chelsea isn't backing away from motherhood or even the possibility of having more kids. She's already talked to doctors about trying again. She has three embryos left and wants to use them. "I want to at least try for a third," she says.