Pregnant woman who nearly died of COVID names baby after Texas doctor who treated her

A Texas woman who survived COVID-19, multiple seizures, a stroke and other health complications while pregnant named her newborn after a doctor who helped save her life.

Diana Crouch, a 28-year-old from Kingwood, was celebrating her anniversary with her husband in Las Vegas in July when she developed a bad headache. Her physical condition worsened when they returned home, and she was later admitted to an emergency room with COVID-19, Good Morning America reported.

Crouch and her husband, Chris, were not vaccinated at the time, the Houston Chronicle reported. They had previously tested positive for COVID-19 and briefly lost their senses of taste and smell but didn’t think it was likely they would become sick again, the outlet reported.

Crouch was also wary of getting vaccinated as a pregnant woman. Fewer than 20% of pregnant people nationwide were vaccinated when she became pregnant in April 2021, The Texas Tribune reported.

Crouch was put on a ventilator and sedated on Aug. 10 and remained hospitalized for four and a half months, the Houston Chronicle reported.

She was 18 weeks pregnant at the time — too early for the baby to be delivered, her doctor, Cameron Dezfulian, told Good Morning America.

“If the pregnancy is a lot further along, then removing the child helps the mom a lot just because it makes space,” Dezfulian told the outlet. “But here, it wasn’t that situation at all.”

Crouch’s condition didn’t improve, and she was soon put on ECMO, a life-support machine. She was 25 weeks pregnant and still on ECMO when she suffered three strokes in one day, as well as seizures and a heart attack, the Houston Chronicle reported.

“After her stroke, she was kind of laying there. She didn’t move or anything for like three days. And I told Dr. Cameron if she starts to wake up, I know we’re gonna walk out of this hospital. And she woke up the next day,” Chris Crouch told Good Morning America.

Once Diana Crouch’s condition “plateaued,” Dezfulian told Good Morning America, she underwent an emergency C-section.

Crouch was introduced to her baby three days later, taken off the ventilator 10 days later and finally released from the hospital on Dec. 23, the Houston Chronicle reported.

“We really felt like this was miraculous,” Dezfulian told Good Morning America. “We prayed a lot and we felt like God was kind of helping us because there’s no textbook on these things. We had to make some really tough choices that could have easily gone poorly. And yet they didn’t.”

The baby was named Cameron, after Dezfulian.

“My first response was, ‘I don’t deserve this,’” Dezfulian told The Texas Tribune. “This was such a team effort. No one physician, nurse or anything can take more than 0.1% credit for this.”

But he told KTRK it’s “such an honor” and that he was “in tears” when the couple told him the baby was named after him.

“I consider this one of a handful of miracles. (Chris) told me that and he said, ‘We are just really grateful and believed that we would get through all of this,’” he told the outlet.

After contracting COVID-19 early in her pregnancy and spending months in the hospital fighting for her life, Crouch now encourages others, especially pregnant people, to learn from her experience and get vaccinated.

She doesn’t remember much of her nearly five months in the hospital — including giving birth to her child. She now does physical therapy five days a week, has difficulty holding Cameron on her own and has to process the mental toll of her experience, The Texas Tribune reported.

“After all I went through, the least of your worries should be the vaccine,” Crouch told the Tribune. “I put my baby through all this as well.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially announced that the vaccine is safe for pregnant people on Aug. 11 and urged people who are pregnant, breastfeeding or hoping to become pregnant to get vaccinated. A recent study of more than 46,000 pregnant people showed that the COVID-19 vaccine did not increase the risk of delivering a baby prematurely, according to Yale Medicine.

Experts say the risk of not getting vaccinated and potentially contracting COVID-19 far outweigh any potential risks associated with the vaccine. Pregnant people who develop symptoms are twice as likely to need admission to a hospital’s intensive care unit and are 70% more likely to die than non-pregnant people, according to Yale Medicine.

“If your thought was, ’Hey, I don’t want to get a vaccine because I don’t want to introduce something into my pregnancy,’ you’ll be introducing a lot of other things when we have to start treating you for a complicated COVID-19 infection,” Manisha Gandhi, chief of maternal fetal medicine at Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women and Baylor College of Medicine, told The Texas Tribune.

This story was originally published February 8, 2022 at 9:19 AM with the headline "Pregnant woman who nearly died of COVID names baby after Texas doctor who treated her."