(China, 29th) — In China’s Jiangsu Province, a 35-year-old woman from Nanjing who has been bedridden for years with a rare disease since she was 8 months old, recently overcame tremendous life-threatening challenges with the help of a dedicated medical team and successfully delivered a healthy baby via C-section, creating a miracle of life. Due to her extremely unique physical condition, anesthesia for the surgery posed exceptionally high risks. Doctors once worried that she may never be able to come off a ventilator or that her life could be endangered.
According to China’s “Red Star News”, 35-year-old Lily (pseudonym) suffers from spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), resulting in weakness throughout her body, inability to stand or walk, and severe scoliosis. Despite her physical limitations, she maintains an optimistic personality, loves to sing, and has gained some popularity on social media. When she became unexpectedly pregnant, this “crystallization of love” brought her multiple deadly risks, including pregnancy-related thrombosis, amniotic fluid embolism, and most significantly, the challenge of general anesthesia.
Because Lily’s spine is severely deformed, she could not undergo spinal anesthesia and had to opt for the much riskier general anesthesia. The doctors pointed out that general anesthesia drugs might aggravate her muscular weakness, potentially causing paralysis of her respiratory muscles after surgery, which could result in lifetime dependency on a ventilator.
Facing all these hurdles, Lily and her husband decided to “take a chance for the sake of the new life.” The Jiangsu Provincial Maternal and Child Health Hospital assembled a cross-disciplinary team of experts from departments such as obstetrics, anesthesiology, neurology, and intensive care medicine to “escort” her.
During the operation, the anesthesia team continuously monitored her brain activity using EEG to gauge anesthesia depth, and precisely administered the minimum amount of anesthetic drugs based on real-time muscle tone data. Ultimately, through the collaborative efforts of the team, the surgery was completed successfully. Even more impressively, Lily was able to come off the ventilator right in the operating room, successfully overcoming the most critical hurdle.
The doctors later stated that Lily’s ability to overcome these difficulties was closely related to her love of singing, which had, unknowingly, strengthened her respiratory muscles. This touching story once again highlights the greatness of motherhood and the progress of medical science.