Image: Kymberlie Shepherd and Wayde Kelly (via Facebook)
Kyden Thomas Bede Kelly entered the world last Thursday, 16 October.
On that same day, his mother — Kymberlie Shepherd, 26 — tragically left it. During her labour at a Perth hospital, the high school teacher started to feel light-headed as she began to push. Minutes later she died. A rare complication known as an amniotic fluid embolism (AFE) had caused fluid from the amniotic sac to enter her bloodstream.
Kymberlie’s devastated fiancé, Wayde Kelly, 26, described her harrowing final moments in an interview with Perth Now.
“I was holding her hand and I looked away for a second, and she just let go of my hand and had a bit of a fit. I was watching her lose colour. It’s something I’ll never forget. The last thing I saw was the smallest nurse jump on the gurney and start giving chest compressions and at that point I felt sick.” he said.
"None of the doctors there had ever seen this happen - we are all just in complete disbelief and shock," Wayde told Yahoo.
In his more than 20 years as an obstetrician, Dr Gino Pecoraro has encountered this rare complication just once.
“It’s very, very dramatic when it happens ... it comes on suddenly,” Dr Pecoraro, who is based in Brisbane and is on the board of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, explains. “One minute the woman’s talking to you normally; the next she’s unconscious.”
Fortunately, in Dr Pecoraro's case, the patient survived. However, the “cascade of events” triggered inside the body when amniotic fluid, which contains cells that have shed from the baby’s skin and carry certain chemicals, enters the bloodstream can be catastrophic and, sadly, fatal.
“It turns on the coagulation pathway, so you get lots and lots of clotting inside mum’s blood vessel system,” Dr Pecoraro explains. This can cause the heart and other organs to fail, blood pressure to drop rapidly, and the body to go into shock and lose consciousness.
“Then she can experience brain irritation, and a coma, but also because it uses up her body’s clotting factors, she can have tremendous bleeding from every orifice and from the uterus,” Dr Pecoraro says.
AFEs are very uncommon in Australia, although the exact rate is unclear. “I’ve read things that say it’s 1 or 2 in 100,000 [births], to 1 or 2 in 10,000 - anywhere in between,” Dr Pecoraro says.