Mother shares story of survival after pulmonary embolism during childbirth
By Breana Ross
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BALTIMORE (WBAL) — A mom who takes nothing for granted is sharing her story after almost dying from a pulmonary embolism during childbirth.
Aaliyah Walker cherishes the simple moments, from holding her babies in her arms to making them bottles. They’re all moments she doesn’t take for granted because they’re moments she almost didn’t get to have.
“When I get to have these moments now, all I am is grateful,” Walker told 11 News.
Walker doesn’t remember the moment her heart stopped after she delivered her twin girls via Cesarean section, but her husband, Brady Arnold, remembers it clearly.
“Everything was going perfect,” Arnold told 11 News. “Aaliyah had seen the babies and was talking about the babies, and then everything just turned into a nightmare. She looked at me and said, ‘I can’t breathe.’ And then, she just lost her heartbeat at that point and they told me I had to leave the room.”
Doctors later told Arnold it was a pulmonary embolism that nearly killed his wife. A blood clot moved to her lungs during her C-section procedure. It took doctors several minutes to get Walker’s heartbeat back.
She was flown from the Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., where she gave birth, to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she spent eight days intubated, nine days in the intensive care unit, 25 days in the hospital and many more days wondering how and why this happened to her.
“This doesn’t happen to people who are young, who are healthy,” Walker said. “What are the odds? There’s no way this happens to anyone else.”
Dr. Pedro Arrabal, the director of maternal and fetal medicine at Sinai Hospital, told 11 News that pulmonary embolisms aren’t a common complication, but doctors are seeing them more and more.
“It tends to be increasing,” Arrabal told 11 News. “There are more pulmonary embolisms, and also, clots in the legs. We call them DVTs, which stands for deep venous thrombosis. There’s more of them for multiple reasons.”
Arrabal told 11 News that the reasons and risk factors include hypertension, diabetes, obesity and having a history of clots. He said doctors are also seeing more older mothers, and they’re doing more C-sections, which are also risk factors for pulmonary embolisms.
Shortness of breath and chest pains are two of the main symptoms of a pulmonary embolism, which can be very sudden and very serious.
“We will see several in a year, and it is one of the major causes of maternal mortality because of pregnancy,” Arrabal told 11 News.
Walker lived to tell her story.
“Brady was like, ‘I think this is something we should share,'” Walker told 11 News. “I think this is something that would be impactful just to let other moms know that this is something that you should look out for. I didn’t have any of the indicating signs. I was extremely active throughout my entire pregnancy, and for this to just happen, it obviously took us by great surprise, and we just want people to know about it.”
Walker shared her story through TikTok videos that have garnered millions of views and many comments of people sharing similar stories.
“When we posted that first video, we did not think that we would, one, get a lot of the comments that we got from people saying, ‘This happened to me,’ ‘This happened to my mom,’ ‘I survived a very similar experience to you.’ And, seeing that community does exist validated posting and sharing that entire difficult part of our lives,” Walker told 11 News.
Walker plans to continue sharing her story by speaking at the Johns Hopkins Venous Thromboembolism Symposium in March.
She’s also sharing her story at a Black Maternal Health Summit in Connecticut, all to help raise awareness.
Her family and friends are raising money to help cover thousands of dollars worth of medical bills from her hospital stay.
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