Mom delivers ‘miracle baby’ after brain surgery

Feb 27, 2015 News

Three months after local doctors informed her parents that she only had 24 hours to live, a smiling Samantha Persaud with her miracle baby daughter, Isabella, in her hand, is duly boasting that she is a survivor.

Samantha Persaud with her baby daughter Isabella

The 21-year-old woman of Lot 8 Shanty Town, Leonora on West Coast Demerara, returned home from Venezuela three Saturdays ago after spending close to two months in the Clinica Puerto Ordaz hospital.
She underwent surgery to remove an abnormality in her brain after which she delivered her baby girl via C-section at the aforementioned medical institution.
Persaud was diagnosed with a “subarachnoid hemorrhage from a ruptured arteriovenous malfunction.” This condition is an abnormal connection between the arteries and the veins in the brain.
She underwent endovascular treatment, a surgical procedure in which a tube containing medication or miniature instruments is inserted percutaneously (through the skin) into a blood vessel for the treatment of vascular disease.
The surgery took four hours and Persaud spent four days in recovery.
The first-time mother was diagnosed with this condition in the sixth month of her pregnancy. Her family spent a total of $4.5M to have the operation done. She is now on a one-year treatment and has to return to Venezuela next year for a follow-up visit.
Yesterday, the woman as well as her parents thanked the public for making the operation possible. She recalled her “life and death” experience.
She said that she was in a coma for two weeks at a private hospital here in September last, and that during this period, doctors informed her relatives that she only had 24 hours to live.
“My parents took me out and carried me home, and then my baby started to suffocate inside of me. My face started to change colour, so my family took me to Georgetown (Public) Hospital,” Persaud recalled.
The young woman was bedridden at this time.
“I got oxygen at the hospital and then they (medical personnel) told my family that I would have to go overseas to get treatment. I went home while my family tried to arrange the money to take me overseas,” the young lady noted.
She was however, taken to Venezuela where she had the operation done.
Persaud claimed that during her frightening ordeal, the person whom she needed the most in her life, her spouse of two years, was not around to support her.
“He was not there for me. When the doctor gave up on me, he (her husband) too gave up on me. My family begged him to come see me at the hospital and he said that I am going to die and he wants no part of it.”
She also claims that when her parents removed her from the private hospital and took her to her husband’s home, he refused to let her in the house where she once lived.
“He was not there for me or my child and now he is fighting me for my baby,” Persaud stated. She alleges that when she was fighting for her life in Venezuela, her spouse was busy meeting with social workers here, trying to take the child away when she arrived home.
Persaud’s father, Mangal Dansham said that now it is time for his daughter to relax after undergoing surgery and she should not be fighting a battle with her husband to keep her baby.
“He was not there for her or the child. I leave my work for two months and I went to Venezuela, selling ice cream at the road corners just to make money for my daughter. Her husband never helped us. We begged everywhere and everyone to save our daughter. Strangers helped us, but her husband neglected her,” an angry Dansham stated.