My partner gave birth in a coma — now she’s trapped in her own body
A British woman was forced to give birth six weeks early — and while in a coma — because a non-cancerous brain tumor she had for years suddenly burst.
Dental hygienist Emma Taylor, 33, abruptly became ill in October when she was seven-and-a-half months pregnant, so she was rushed to the hospital by her partner, Scott Weeks, SWNS reports.
“I called an ambulance, but they couldn’t get to us fast enough, so I decided to drive Emma myself,” Weeks, 47, told the outlet.
“It’s lucky I did, because doctors said if I had waited four hours, there would have been a very different outcome.”
Doctors discovered the tumor and Taylor was placed in a medically induced coma so she could give birth to Ophelia via emergency caesarean section.
The baby suffered no complications despite being born six weeks premature.
“They needed to carry out scans on Emma, but to do that safely, they delivered Ophelia first,” Weeks explained.
“The scans then showed a huge tumor she’d been living with which had burst after pregnancy hormones accelerated its growth. This caused a bleed on the brain, and as a result, her right brain stem and right eye were affected — leaving her left side paralyzed,” he continued.
Taylor was airlifted to Queen’s Hospital in London, where she underwent surgery to remove the brain tumor two days after giving birth.
Surgeons reported successfully removing two-thirds of the 60-millimeter tumor — and Taylor remained in a coma for three months.
Now, she is recovering at a rehab center, as she suffered paralysis.
She only communicates using her head and hands, but she’s determined to get better for Ophelia.
“She’s at the stage where she can communicate with head movements and her hands, we’ve even had a few tears,” Weeks shared.
Doctors suspect Taylor had been living with the tumor since she was young, Weeks said, adding that she had complained of a headache before being rushed to the hospital.
He recalled the left side of her body appearing lifeless and her right eye half open and half closed.
“I knew she hadn’t been feeling well, and while I was downstairs she fell out the bed and was sick on the floor,” said Weeks, who works in sales and marketing.
Three months after the procedure, at the end of January, Taylor began to demonstrate “cyclical consciousness,” according to SWNS.
Weeks says the publicly funded British health care system has since deemed Taylor a lower priority and he’s worried about cutbacks to her rehabilitation therapy.
“Although NHS staff have been amazing, due to a lack of beds, she will be moved into a lower intensity rehab program, which I fear will impact her progress,” he confessed.
He’s raising money via GoFundMe to put Taylor in a private rehabilitation program, with the goal of collecting about $630,000. More than $35,000 had been pledged as of Wednesday afternoon.
“The intensive physio therapy is critical to her recovery and without this we fear that she will never be able to recover enough to go home again and to regain her independence,” Weeks wrote on the fund-raising page.
He hopes Taylor will be able to walk and talk once again.
“She’s trapped in her own body — and I know all that she wants is to come home to her baby,” he said.
