A Michigan mom says she owes her life today to an unexpected hero – her unborn daughter.
When Amanda Banic reached the 35th week of her pregnancy, she started suffering severe chest pains.
Worried it was a heart attack, she and her husband rushed to the emergency room. Doctors thought it was anxiety and sent her home.
Days later, Amanda had chest pains again, this time with pain in her jaw and blurry vision.
“I just felt in that moment that this was it. I think I’m dying,” Amanda told Good Morning America. “I didn’t know how else to explain it. I had just never felt anything like it.”
Now realizing the severity of her condition, doctors rushed her to a larger hospital over 80 miles away.
Amanda experienced a tear in her aorta, an illness known as aortic dissection. This life-threatening situation could have killed her if she hadn’t been pregnant.
She required urgent surgery and early delivery of her baby.
“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,” Amanda recalled. “Then it hit me that it was a pretty serious situation.”
“The very last thing I remember saying was, ‘Just please make sure I get to meet my baby,'” she added.
Amanda gave birth to her daughter Baylor via emergency cesarean section. In spite of Amanda’s life-threatening condition, her daughter was born healthy, but Amanda would have to wait to meet her until nearly one week later.
Immediately after giving birth, Amanda underwent a nearly 13-hour surgery to fix the tear in her aorta.
The next morning, she underwent a triple bypass open-heart surgery to redirect blood around her arteries.
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“Over a span of 24 hours, I had a triple bypass, a C-section, and aortic dissection repair surgery,” Mrs. Banic revealed. “[Doctors] contacted my family… and let them know that I was the sickest person in the hospital and the only thing I had going for me was my age and my health before pregnancy, just the fact that I was young and healthy.”
“Because of the way I dissected, [baby Baylor]kind of was in there, essentially holding everything together,” Amanda shared in a recent interview with Good Morning America. “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 ways than one.”
During this critical time, baby Baylor recovered in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) due to her premature birth.
Amanda’s husband, Derek, praised the Lord for his wife and daughter’s recovery: “I just, I can’t thank God enough, honestly.”
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