Diana Crouch and Cameron
Diana Crouch knows that she and her now-3-month-old son are both lucky to be alive.
The 28-year-old mom from Kingwood, Texas, was enjoying a healthy pregnancy last summer, up until she contracted COVID-19. Crouch had been cautious, making sure to drink plenty of water, eat well and exercise, and even changed up her skincare routine to avoid any harmful chemicals, she told the Texas Tribune. But she skipped out on getting the COVID-19 vaccine, despite urging from OB-GYNs and the Centers for Disease Control that it’s not only entirely safe, but extremely necessary for pregnant women.
“I just didn’t want to risk it,” Crouch said. “I was like, we have an immune system for this, and I don’t want to do anything that might affect my baby.”
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Crouch and her husband, Chris, took a trip to Las Vegas during her second trimester, and when they returned she started having bad headaches that turned into a fever and low oxygen levels. Chris took her to the hospital on Aug. 6, where she was diagnosed with COVID pneumonia and started struggling to breathe.
“The last thing I remember is telling [her doctor] that I don’t want to be put on a ventilator,” Diana told ABC13.
But at 18 weeks pregnant with worryingly low oxygen levels, a ventilator was necessary. After two weeks sedated and on the ventilator, though, Diana wasn’t improving, and her doctor, Cameron Dezfulian, the director of the Adult Congenital Heart Disease ICU at Texas Children’s, told Chris that she may need to go on ECMO — a machine that pumps a patient’s blood outside the body to give the heart and lungs a rest — as a last resort.
Chris was concerned about putting her on ECMO, but he remembered thinking “I may go home without anything” if he didn’t, he told the Texas Tribune. “With a dead baby and a dead wife … there were some really dark days.”
After going on the ECMO, Diana started to improve and was able to come out of sedation. She made it to 25 weeks of pregnancy, meaning the baby was able to survive outside the womb, and doctors prepared to deliver at any moment, though they hoped Diana and the baby could continue for longer.
“The outcomes get better with every week,” Dezfulian said. “As long as we didn’t think the baby was causing harm to her, we wanted to get them both through as long as possible. She had voiced that from the start, that she wanted to give her baby the best chance possible.”
But soon after, Diana suddenly had three strokes, seizures and a heart attack, which Dezfulian said was from having COVID-19 and being on ECMO.
“Being pregnant, having COVID and being on ECMO are the three major risk factors for blood clots,” Dezfulian said. “COVID also puts you at risk for bleeding. She’d had significant internal bleeding for weeks.”
Diana went into a coma, and Chris said Dezfulian prayed with him.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever had a doctor pray with me and I didn’t know how to think about that,” Chris said. “Because when a doctor is praying with you, you know there’s not much else … we can do.”
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Thankfully, Diana started to improve, and doctors delivered their son at 31 weeks. Chris and Diana decided to name him Cameron, after Dezfulian.
“It’s never happened before,” Dezfulian told ABC13. “When they told me, I was in tears. It’s such an honor. I told them I said I don’t deserve this.”
Diana was still in and out of consciousness and doesn’t remember giving birth, nor the three days after, until a nurse brought Cameron up to see her. But she was getting stronger each day, and on Dec. 23, after 139 days in the hospital, she was able to go home.
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Diana is still on oxygen and has a chest tube in place to keep her lungs from collapsing. She also can’t hold Cameron without support, because she lost strength her left arm from the stroke.
“Sometimes, I lay in bed and cry, because I can’t believe she went through all that,” Chris told ABC13. “She gets discouraged at times because she can’t do a lot of the things she used to, but I tell her to be in this situation is something I prayed for because it wasn’t looking good at all.”
But Diana is doing physical therapy, and five days after she was released from the hospital she got the COVID-19 vaccine, which she’s urging other pregnant women to do too.
“After all I went through, the least of your worries should be the vaccine,” she told the Texas Tribune. “I put my baby through all this as well.”
And Chris, who said that he’s conservative, got vaccinated while Diana was in the hospital, a decision that his unvaccinated friends and family still question.
“But I’m not getting into politics with them,” he said. “I just say, if you can eliminate what happened to me, if you can do damage control, why not do it? Why risk it like we did?”