A pregnant British woman who was suffering from COVID-19 was placed in an induced coma, but when she came out of it, she awakened to discover she had given birth to healthy twins.
"I was pregnant at 24 to 25 weeks, at that stage, and by the time I woke up, I was so disorientated,” Perpetual Uke, who works as a rheumatology consultant at Birmingham City Hospital, told Sky News. “I thought I'd lost my pregnancy because I couldn't see my bump any more. I was really worried.”
Uke became sick with flu-like symptoms in late March -- around the time of massive coronavirus spread in the United Kingdom. Her condition worsened and she was eventually placed on a ventilator and placed in the induced coma at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital. On April 10, during Uke’s 26th week, she gave birth by cesarean section to Palmer, a girl, and Pascal, a boy; both weighing just over one pound.
"They were so tiny they didn't look like my older kids, I couldn't touch them, I felt so emotional," she said.
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Her husband Matthew shared in her worry, but was also equally worried about his wife’s survival.
"I had mixed feelings when the twins were brought out,", he told Sky News. "But my wife was still in a coma, sick, I couldn't talk to her. I was happy the twins were delivered but the thing is, is my wife coming home?"
The babies were placed in incubators in the hospital’s specialist neonatal intensive care unit. Uke spent another 16 days comatose in its critical care unit before she was able to see them, the BBC reports. After a total of 116 days, they were all discharged from the hospital and the children are now "getting better as the days go by," she said.
"I had never wanted them to go through this difficult path at the start of their lives. They couldn't see their mum for two weeks, which obviously made me very sad but, importantly, things had progressed well."