Per reports, the unfortunate mother and father, Bex and Martin, spent 8 long minutes waiting to hear their daughter’s first cry at the hospital. Their baby daughter, Rose, was reportedly born via emergency C-section after her heart stopped beating during labor. The mother recounted her experience: “It was a perfectly healthy, normal nine months up until when I went into labor. Even when I went to have a C section it was planned because I just hadn’t been progressing for four days. I was so drugged up I didn’t realize, but after 15 minutes it turned into an emergency C section because Rose’s heart rate suddenly dropped. All these people suddenly came rushing in so I was aware something was wrong.”
Doctors then spent 8 minutes trying to resuscitate the baby when they detected a heartbeat. Three minutes later, Rose’s heartbeat was fully established. At 3.4kg, Rose was then bundled into an incubator and taken to the High Intensity Neonatal Care Unit. The specialist team then administered “Cooling Therapy”, treatment that freezes the baby for three days to prevent brain damage, which cooled Rose’s body from 37C to 33.5C. After 15 months, Rose made a full recovery. “I knew when they had taken her out of me, I just kept saying: ‘I can’t hear her crying, what’s going on? Why isn’t she crying?’ Everybody expects to hear their baby cry when they are born and the longer it went on the worse it got,” the mother also said. “It was the worst feeling in the world. Martin was amazing, he was telling me it would all be OK. I couldn’t see what was going on. I just saw her getting wheeled past me into ITU – I didn’t even get to hold her.” Because there were no free beds at the hospital, the mother was forced to remain at a different hospital, when she self-discharged to be with her daughter.
“It was agonizing. I told Martin to go to the hospital with Rose because even though she didn’t know him yet I felt she needed someone familiar there. I hadn’t even held my own baby. So after two days I gave up waiting and just left the hospital myself. It was amazing, Martin picked me up and at last I got to be with Rose. Although I couldn’t hold her, I could touch her little hands. She didn’t cry for four weeks. Because she had so many tubes and they hurt her throat, she didn’t know how to cry,” she said. “It’s strange, but all we wanted was to hear our baby cry. Now she does plenty of that though,” Bex added. A year later, Rose is perfectly healthy, with no apparent mental or physical difficulties.
“The cooling therapy really is amazing. Essentially, when the brain is starved of oxygen the damage is like a fire that continues to burn in the head,” Martin said. “By cooling the whole baby straight away it just stops that happening and prevents any further damage. They put her in a little suit connected to a refrigerator unit for three days, and then on the fourth day gradually brought her core temperature back up. She has just been amazing in her recovery. We have been told there is still a risk that she could suffer developmental issues, but so far she is perfectly fine.” He added: “Those minutes really were awful. When she was taken away in the incubator her legs were kicking in a cyclical movement and I thought she might have been fitting. Now she’s just a perfectly healthy baby.”
