"God’s hand was all over everything."

Lindsey Bever reports in the Washington Post,

Shelly Cawley was in a coma for a week after the emergency delivery of her daughter. A nurse suggested skin-to-skin contact might improve her condition. This family cell phone footage shows what happened about an hour after she started to wake up.

Her blood pressure was dangerously low (60/40, doctors later told the family) and her heart rate was soaring (more than 180 beats per minute). Cawley was hooked up to what doctors called "the last-chance ventilator," a machine pumping air into her lungs with such force that it rattled her hospital bed with each artificial breath, her husband, Jeremy Cawley, said.

"We pinched Rylan and tickled her a little bit so that Shelly would hear her cry," he said with a chuckle.

When the baby did, her mother's vitals jumped, doctors told Jeremy Cawley. He said he was told it may have given her the strength she needed to push through. A week later, Shelly Cawley woke up and met her baby daughter.

A month before Cawley's due date, she said she developed a blood clot in her leg. Doctors began treating it with blood thinners.

On Sept. 5, 2014, her water broke.

She and her husband went to the Carolinas Medical Center-NorthEast in Concord and waited for her labor to progress. It never did.

Doctors diagnosed Cawley with preeclampsia — characterized by extremely high blood pressure — and a life-threatening condition called HELLP syndrome. Doctors, she said, told her that the only option was to deliver by C-section.

She was wheeled into the operating room at around 11:30 that night.

...Doctors told him that Cawley's lungs were filling with fluid and she was having trouble breathing on her own. He said doctors later discovered that Rylan's weight was holding the blood clot in place and, when she was delivered, the clot migrated to Cawley's lung — quickly causing a pulmonary embolism.

...The skin-to-skin method is used to reinforce the mother-baby bond — a technique, doctors say, has noticeable benefits for both a mother and her child. Immediately after childbirth, the baby is placed on the mother’s chest. This physical touch has been shown to stimulate the newborn’s brain development, stabilize heart rate and help maintain body temperature.

Research has shown that it also helps prepare both mother and baby for the first breastfeeding.

“It was such an emotional and spiritual journey for our family while she was gone,” Jeremy Cawley said. "God’s hand was all over everything."

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