Sonja, California, MD – 30 at time of event (1999)
Sonja has a beautiful 10-year-old son to remind her of the morning she was declared dead. Her pregnancy had been completely normal, until she went in for the delivery of her second son. She thought it was time, but the OB-GYN thought otherwise. The labor was quite intense, such strong pain and yet she was not dilating. She was told to return the next day. During a bathroom visit to get changed, her water broke, so she stayed in the hospital for overnight observation. Lucky they hadn’t sent her home, because at 3:16 am she suffered a cardiac arrest.
Despite advance medical directives to the contrary, Sonja received major life saving procedures. She was intubated and defibrillated many times, but they were unable to stop her arrests. Her medical file was incomplete, the clear request for no blood transfusions, no life support, no life sustaining efforts of any kind, were missing.
“I didn’t expect it, but if anything did happen— just let me go,” Sonja explained.
Because Sonja was in labor the medical decisions were more difficult, their options were limited and time-bound. Once the medical staff realized they could not resuscitate Sonja, they declared her deceased and performed an emergency C-section to save the baby.
One of the nurses knew Sonja personally and couldn’t just let her die. She began manual CPR again, and miraculously restored a faint heartbeat. Sonja was put on life support and it was then that the medicos identified that she had Disseminated Intravascular Coagulopathy (DIC)* and required hundreds of units of blood. She also had emergency surgery to save her, thinking there may have been damage to her uterus. The survival rate for DIC is extremely low, and Sonja’s save became a Bethesda Hospital Case study, the NIH were also very interested in her case.
After two weeks in a coma, Sonja’s family were confronted with the decision to remove life support. It was a difficult request since there had been some evidence of brain activity.
“I woke up from the coma like I’d been sleeping!” Sonja exclaimed. “I was in the most peaceful state I’ve ever been through,” she said of the coma. “I didn’t even know I’d had a child, [or] that I had been pregnant and given birth.”
Sonja lost a year of memory, and now relies on other people’s descriptions of that time. Her voice was also affected by all the time she was intubated.
When Sonja asked her physician about the event she was surprised at the answer.
“She said, ‘We had every doctor in place. The neurologist was there, the anesthesiologist was there, the pediatrician was there, the general surgeon was there.’ At three sixteen am, all five doctors were there! She said if any one of them had to have been called in I would not be here.”
-Jeremy Whitehead
* DIC begins with an event that triggers widespread clotting with the formation of microthrombi throughout the circulatory system. This excessive clotting damages organs, destroys blood cells, and depletes the supply of platelets and other clotting factors so that the blood is no longer able to clot normally.