Baby born under extremely rare circumstances, Merced doctor says

A Merced mother and her newborn baby girl are celebrating Thanksgiving at home this year, grateful to be around friends and family after narrowly surviving a rare condition during childbirth that nearly turned tragic.

Cheryl Garcia’s daughter, Kloé, was born Oct. 16 during surgery after doctors realized she had somehow slipped out of her mother’s uterus and into her abdomen, a situation Dr. George Alkhouri said he’d never heard of and was “extremely rare” to say the least.

Had Alkhouri not arrived at Mercy Medical Center when he did, he said, both Cheryl and Kloé might not have made it.

“I keep dreaming about it every day,” the obstetrics and gynecology doctor told the Sun-Star. “If I was one to two minutes late, I could’ve lost both of them.”

Both are fine, but the birth was scary.

Garcia, 30, said that during most of the pregnancy, Kloé, had been in a sideways position that could have required a cesarean section, or C-section.

Soon after Garcia received an epidural anesthetic, the doctors and nurses no longer could feel the baby and Garcia started to bleed.

Garcia blacked out.

Her husband, Abraham, knew something was wrong. There was a lot of blood. His wife wasn’t moving. Doctors and nurses were rushing in and out of the room. He prayed.

The 31-year-old father said he remembers hearing the nurses talking to his wife, saying, “Stay with me. Don’t go, don’t go.”

“All of a sudden after that, I saw her body gasp for air and come back to life,” he said.

Cheryl was rushed to an operating room, Alkhouri said, and by the time he arrived there were more than a dozen people in the room, the baby’s heartbeat was weak and her blood pressure was up.

“The minute I opened the abdomen, it was all blood,” Alkhouri said. “I couldn’t see anything.”

Alkhouri said he couldn’t find Kloé in the uterus, where she should have been, and when he felt the baby’s feet, he realized she was outside the uterus and inside the abdomen.

The uterus had ruptured, Alkhouri said, and when that happens there’s no other choice but to remove it.

“It was a very unusual case,” he said. “I never heard of something like this. It’s very, very rare. She is lucky she and her baby are alive.”

Baby Kloé suffered a brain hemorrhage and had to be resuscitated because she had no oxygen, Cheryl said.

Thankfully, family members said, the surgery went well and the story has a happy ending.

She was flown to Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, and remained hospitalized for three weeks.

“I have this whole new appreciation for life,” Cheryl said. “I have a second chance at life.”

Out of the five kids they now have, Abraham said this was by far the most difficult birthing process, something he hopes no one else has to endure.

“Right now, I celebrate Cheryl every day,” Alkhouri said. “For me it (wasn’t) only a lost uterus that day. It was a life-and-death situation.”

Cheryl checked in with Alkhouri on Wednesday and was cleared to cook, just in time for the big dinner the Garcias have every year and the traditional pumpkin pie they make from scratch.

“Thank you, doctor, for saving my life,” she said. “I think about him every day.”

This story was originally published November 23, 2016 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Baby born under extremely rare circumstances, Merced doctor says."