A Vancouver, Washington mother delivered a baby while fighting COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, on April 1. The baby was born days after the mother, Angela Primachenko, was put into a medically-induced coma. Thankfully, the baby and Primachenko’s husband have both tested negative for the coronavirus.
Primachenko started feeling ill on March 22, at 33 weeks pregnant and with no underlying health issues, reports KGW. Her twin sister, Oksana Luiten, said Primachenko thought her allergies were acting up, but she decided to get tested for the coronavirus later. “Two days later, it’s been a fever and she was like, ‘I’m pregnant and with corona going around, I’m just going to go to the hospital to get myself tested,’” Luiten recalled.
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Primachenko was tested on March 24 and the test came back positive two days later. She was hospitalized in the intensive care unit and hooked up to a ventilator. On March 29, she was placed in a medically-induced coma as she conitnued getting weaker. Her doctors hoped putting her in a coma would help her body fight the illness. On April 1, doctors induced Primachenko and she gave birth to a baby girl.
“Her lungs will have more space and all of her nutrients will come to her, and they could flip her on her tummy so her lungs could be cleared out,” Luiten told KGW. “The baby is in the NICU for now until she can poop on her own and eat on her own; then they will send her home with dad.”
While her brother-in-law and niece tested negative for the virus, Primachenko said she is still worried about her sister. Luiten said her sister was “getting worse” and the doctors did an X-ray of her sister’s lungs and they are “so not doing good” on Sunday. Thankfully on Monday, her doctors said Primachenko was getting better and she was taken off the ventilator. Primachenko can breath on her own now and spoke with her husband via video chat.
Luiten thanked her community for being supportive and credited her family’s faith with helping. “I don’t know how else to make it through without faith. Faith for healing, faith for life after death. Faith for it all,” she said.
It’s not clear when Primachenko could come home, but Luiten started a GoFundMe account to help pay her sister’s medical bills. So far, she has raised over $47,000 of her $75,000 goal. “Angela’s like honestly the kindest person ever and now that her story is like a glimmer of hope in this chaos, I feel that’s something that she would want to share with people, is that hope, because she’s so kind and she wants to give hope to every person,” Lutien told KPTV. “So that’s why I’m like, I want to do this story for her.”
There are more than 1.5 million coronavirus cases worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University. In the U.S., there are more than 460,000 cases. The U.S. death toll stands at just over 16,500, with more than 5,100 deaths in New York City alone.
