“The situation created a lot of stress because we knew that there were few cases of survival reported in a context as serious as that of our patient”, says Paula Velasquez, a doctor specializing in internal medicine at the Versalles clinic in the city of Cali, in south-eastern Colombia. It was in this establishment that Diana Angola, 36, gave birth while fighting for her survival against the Covid-19.
The 30-year-old mother of a child was hospitalized on May 15 due to a high fever. Three days later, she was plunged into an artificial coma. Because of her pregnancy, she had to be kept seated at a 45-degree angle, while people with pneumonia are normally lying on their stomachs to facilitate their breathing. Doctors then performed a caesarean in early June to give birth to the child prematurely, given the state of the young woman’s lungs weakened by the virus.
“The doctors helped us survive”
Jefferson was born at 27½ weeks of pregnancy and without the coronavirus. “A human being can survive from 24 weeks with good weight, but with a lot of technology and an effect on neurological development and the lungs”, says Dr. Velasquez. But according to pediatrician Edwin Olivo, one of the specialists involved in childbirth, the child quickly started to gain weight and the condition of the infant, still in an incubator, gradually improved. He weighed only 875 grams at birth.
“He was born with great difficulty breathing, we had to resuscitate him, we had to go through the whole procedure of a critical patient”, explains the practitioner. “It’s really moving to know that we fought, that the doctors helped us survive”, says the mother, who did not discover her baby until 21 days after giving birth, when she came out of a coma at the end of last week.
Colombia, sixth country most affected by the virus in Latin America
” It’s a miracle “, adds Javier Torres, the intensive care coordinator of the clinic, quoted by the daily ?Time ?. “I think this is new, because what the literature says is that at this stage of gestation, the baby generally dies from Covid-19”, if his mother is affected.
The young woman, now cured of the coronavirus, does not know how she was infected and her family assures that she strictly respected the confinement imposed as of March 25 in Colombia. While Latin America is the new epicenter of the pandemic, her sister Angela wants the story lived by her sister and her nephew to be used to raise awareness.
“There are a lot of people who go out without a mask, who party, because they don’t know anyone with the virus, they don’t realize” of her dangerousness, she said. With more than 2,600 deaths and 80,000 cases declared, Colombia is the sixth most affected country in Latin America in number of deaths and the fifth in number of infections.
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