Doctors thought she was having a heart attack — but for this pregnant mom, her chest pain was a much more serious complication. And amazingly, her preborn baby saved her life.
Amanda Banic was 35 weeks pregnant when she began having severe chest pains. It was her first baby, and she and her husband rushed to the emergency room. At first, it was brushed off as indigestion and anxiety, and Banic was sent home — but the pain got worse, even causing her vision to become blurry.
“I just felt in that moment that this was it. I think I’m dying,” she told Good Morning America. “I didn’t know how else to explain it. I had just never felt anything like it.”
It was so intense, she told TODAY that it was like “a knife shredding through me.” Her husband insisted she go back to the hospital, but having already been dismissed by staff once, she was reluctant to go again; he, however, refused to let her stay home, which likely helped save her life.
“I’m like, ‘I’m not going to go to the hospital because they’re just going to send me away with anxiety,’” she recalls. “I felt like at that point I was going to be made a mockery of,” she said. “They’ve already told us that had we not went back to the hospital, I was within hours of passing. It was overwhelming.”
Banic, it turns out, was not having a heart attack — she was experiencing an aortic dissection, meaning her aorta, the largest blood vessel in the body, was torn. This condition is often fatal.
Still, she didn’t realize just how serious it was at first. “I don’t think I even realized really what was happening until I got to Grand Rapids and was rolled into the operating room and it was just packed to the gills with doctors and nurses and techs. Then it hit me that it was a pretty serious situation,” she said, adding, “The very last thing I remember saying was, ‘Just please make sure I get to meet my baby.'”
Her baby girl, Baylor, was born via emergency c-section. Dr. Stephane Leung, a cardiothoracic surgeon, told TODAY he worked together with Dr. Erin Fricke, a high-risk obstetrician, to ensure that both mom and baby were able to be treated. “I asked her if she was having a boy or a girl, and she told me it was a girl. And I asked what the baby’s name was,” Fricke said. “It’s such a huge moment in her life that I didn’t want to ignore the importance of this being the birth of her child.”
For a while, doctors told her family that Banic was the sickest person in the hospital and might not survive. Wanting to encourage bonding, nurses held Baylor to her mother for skin-to-skin contact, even while she was unconscious, and it had an incredible effect. “Some of the only times I would react on life support was when they would do skin-to-skin with [Baylor], and apparently I would cry when they would do that,” Banic said. “Love is a powerful thing, and the bond between a mother and a baby, it’s unreal.”
It also turned out that Baylor is part of why Banic was able to survive.
“Because of the way I dissected, she kind of was in there, essentially holding everything together,” she said. “Had she not been in there putting the pressure on all the right places, my outcome may have been very different, so she’s kind of a little miracle, in more more ways than one.”
Though Leung was not able to close the entire tear, because Banic’s dissection was so severe, he was able to repair it enough that she improved drastically. “Within two or three days, she completely recovered, which I would say is nothing short of a miracle,” he said.
He will continue to monitor her heart through CT scans, but otherwise, her prognosis is good. “(She needs) good blood pressure control, and we say no heavy lifting and only because heavy lifting increases your blood pressure,” he explained. “Those are basically the only restrictions, but otherwise she should be able to live a completely normal life.”
Banic won’t be able to carry another child, as doctors have said it’s too risky, so she is enjoying every moment with her little girl.
“I’ve dreamed about these days, but they are just beyond precious,” she said. “I don’t take a single day for granted. Every day seems like a holiday for us. I just take advantage of every single day.”
