A woman who was 'clinically dead' for 14 minutes woke up to discover she'd given birth to a baby girl.
Natasha Sokunbi had been 37 weeks pregnant when she began suffering from chest pains and had trouble breathing, so she called 111 and was advised to go to hospital.
Arriving at the Royal Stoke University Hospital in a taxi, the Stafford woman collapsed in the waiting room of a cardiac arrest.
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While efforts were made to resuscitate her doctors were also working on saving her unborn baby, with Natasha being rushed into surgery and her baby being born by emergency c-section four minutes later.
Hospital staff spent over half an hour resuscitating her before putting her into an induced coma. She then woke up the next day to discover that she'd given birth during her near-death experience, with her daughter being called Beau.
"My heart wasn't beating when the doctors delivered Beau. I was basically dead when they pulled her out." Natasha explained.
"One team of medics were delivering her via C-section while another team performed CPR on me. The next thing I remember was when I woke up in intensive care and my husband walked over to me with a photo of Beau and said ‘it’s a girl’.
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"We hadn't found out the sex so it was a complete surprise. I couldn’t see Beau straight away because I was still very weak and she was in the neonatal unit but I finally saw her a few days later.
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“I was really poorly but the doctors and medical teams were amazing. They told me I'd been clinically dead for 14 minutes. They saved my baby and they saved me.”
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Natasha, 30, and her husband Ayo, 29, had been preparing to welcome their second child when she collapsed in A&E on 3 December.
She'd not been feeling well 'for a couple of weeks because of a chest infection' and on the day she 'died', she took a taxi to the hospital after calling 111.
Natasha remembered collapsing in the waiting room and falling 'forward onto my baby bump', and she also remembered the doctors performing CPR.
She could also 'remember being in pain' during the c-section, but then everything went black.
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Ayo had been looking after the couple's other daughter, named Love, when he got a call from the hospital and initially thought doctors were trying to tell him the baby had been born.
Natasha said she had heart problems and thinks the pregnancy put more strain on her, but she's very 'grateful to the doctors for saving me and Beau' and praised the hospital staff as 'all fantastic' for helping keep her alive and deliver her 'miracle' daughter.
In recognition of their quick actions, the hospital staff involved with Natasha and Beau's care were awarded with the Chief Executive Award, as Dr Andrew Bennett called it 'one of the proudest moments that this department really has ever seen'.
Joe Harker