Grandmother Suffers Heart Attack During Daughter’s Labor, Survives 45 Minutes with No Pulse to Meet Grandbaby

A Baltimore family faced a frightening situation when the matriarch, Kathy Patten, went into cardiac arrest on the day her granddaughter was born — a granddaughter that she now calls her guardian angel.

Her daughter Stacey Fifer was already dealing with a pregnancy surrounded by sadness. “At the time we found out that we were pregnant, my husband had already been diagnosed with cancer,” Stacey tells PEOPLE exclusively. “Having the positive light [of a new baby] really was the inspiration that we needed to move forward with courage and strength.”

Throughout her pregnancy, Stacey’s mom, Kathy, was by her side. When she went into labor in 2021, Kathy was with her in her room at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center. Stacey recalls her mom starting to feel unwell. “She was sitting on the couch. She had an unsettled stomach and wasn’t really sure why. She thought that she was gonna vomit and she did,” Stacey says.

Kathy says she knew something was wrong. “I did feel something in my arm and I told Stacey to call the doctor,” Kathy recalls. She even told her, “I think I am having a heart attack.” She remembers being upset, because “I wanted to be there to witness the birth.”

But Stacey told her, “Don’t worry about me, Mom. You just focus on yourself. You call me when you’re situated. I’m fine, and you just let me know that you’re OK.”

As Kathy was removed from the labor and delivery room, Stacey was terrified. “I just remember begging the doctors, ‘Please, please, please, I can’t lose my mom the day that I give birth to my daughter,’ “ she says.

Then Kathy suffered cardiac arrest. Her heart stopped — and doctors couldn’t get it to restart.

Dr. Dov Frankel remembers the day very well. “The call quickly turned to a code blue. Code blue — it’s not, like, they’re about to die or they’re just having some pain — they’re dead.”

He said that Kathy didn’t have a heartbeat. “Every time we shocked her, she went back into flatline, which required more compression, which then required more shocking.” At this point, she’d been without a heartbeat for a half hour.

Meanwhile, Stacey was in active labor. 

“I am unable to move with the epidural, not even knowing how to process it,” she said. She was told that they’d been unable to resuscitate her mom. “You could see on the faces of the nurses and doctors. It was over. My husband is calling my family letting everybody know that my mom has passed away.”

“I became very upset and it put the baby in a distressed state,” she recalled. “They were trying to do what they could to keep me as calm as possible for me and my daughter.”

In her mom’s room, Frankel was determined that Kathy meet her granddaughter.

“I was looking at her and I said, ‘You need to see your grandchild. Like, we’re not giving up,’ “ he said. He began to wonder if she had a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in her lung. At that point, he decided to push a medication, which he described as “liquid Drano for the body. Anywhere that there’s a clot is just going to dissolve.”

As explained, it’s not something they typically do, but in this case, he was willing to try anything: “You cannot kill dead.” 

On the next shock, Kathy’s heart restarted. She was stable enough to be taken to another hospital. Dr. Frankel went with her in the ambulance. He remembers thinking, “If something would happen in this five-minute ambulance ride. I wouldn’t be able to live with it. And we need to see this all the way. We need to make sure she can make it.”

Stacey delivered a healthy baby. But the joy of life with her newborn was also tinged with worry about her mom.

They didn’t know what recovery might look like. “She was in liver failure, she was in kidney failure, her heart was weak. We didn’t know if she was gonna be brain dead. We didn’t know the level of life that she was gonna have, if she even did make it through this.”

Forty-five minutes without a heartbeat is not something patients normally recover from, Frankel says.

“I’ve had patients where we’ve worked really long and hard on and they’ve, you know, ‘made it’ and came back, but they’ve never had a meaningful life after that,” he said.

But in this case, because Kathy was already at the hospital, doctors were able to administer continuous CPR and oxygenation, keeping her brain viable until her heart finally restarted.

Stacey was able to talk to her mother over speaker phone as she recuperated. Finally, a month later, Kathy was able to hold her granddaughter Alora, whom she considers her “guardian angel.”

“She saved me,” Kathy said. “It’s a miracle.” If she hadn’t been there to witness her granddaughter’s birth, she wouldn’t have been resuscitated.

Frankel agrees: “There are so many parts to this story that is to me clear as divine intervention.” And, he adds, “I was wrong. In reality, she did not have a blood clot. What she had was an actual heart attack and she had one of her blood vessels in her heart that was blocked.” It was a widowmaker, but “that liquid Drano opened that up. It was the right thing for the wrong reason.”

And she recovered beautifully, Frankel says. “She’s able to talk, able to walk, able to play with her grandchildren, able to do everything.”

Unfortunately, Stacey’s husband, Alora’s dad, died from cancer.

“I tried to envision what my life would be had I lost my mom,” Stacey said. “God or the universe saved her that day because they knew that I needed her.”