TOMBALL, Texas — A Houston-area woman was clinically dead for nearly 45 minutes after giving birth to triplets and miraculously survived.
Marisa Christie from Tomball said she last remembers going to the movies the weekend before her C-section. She has no memory of the 48 to 72 hours leading up to and including the delivery as well as its complications.
Her husband, Dylan Christie, and a team of doctors had to fill Marisa in on exactly what took place at Memorial Hermann in the Woodlands.
With four kids under the age of 5, life is a bit of organized chaos for the Christie family. Their favorite place to be is home together as a family.
“I try to remind myself in those hard moments I’m like I almost missed all of it so it kind of puts it in perspective,” Marisa said.
After giving birth to the couple’s triplet girls in late August, the mom-of-four flatlined multiple times in 45 minutes.
Dylan was in the delivery room and explained the moment everything took a sharp turn.
“It was the toughest moment of my life going from the most beautiful experience in seeing our baby girls for the first time to ‘oh my gosh my wife is—they’re doing CPR on her’. I just remember going to the restroom and collapsing on the ground expressing myself to God,” Dylan said.
Dr. Amber Samuel is Marisa’s Maternal Fetal Medicine Physician with Memorial Hermann. She said Marisa survived an extremely rare post-birth complication called amniotic fluid embolism, which can have as high as an 80 percent fatality rate.
“Some exposure that causes the mom's body to react like a really bad allergic reaction. I think they call it like 7.7 cases on 100,000,” Dr. Samuel said.
In Marisa’s case, it led her husband to make the call for her to get a life-saving hysterectomy. When she woke up there was no knowledge of giving birth.
“My family took lots of photos and videos of me when I was in the hospital, which helped a lot to kind of have reality hit,” Marisa said.
Her reality included re-learning how to walk and celebrating their girls graduating from the NICU.
“They were really sneaky. They didn’t tell us they would have everybody in the hallway,” Marisa said.
In video provided to us by Memorial Hermann you see Marisa’s ICU nurses and the girls’ NICU nurses celebrating how far they’ve come amidst the chaos.
“I don’t think I would have been alive if I had not been at that hospital,” Marisa said.
The family is still sorting through a number of hospital bills. They are fundraising online to support the costs.