Pregnant woman loses first child after sudden collapse leads to horrific ordeal
A young Melbourne school teacher is lucky to be alive after suffering a sudden and massive brain bleed and stroke while home alone earlier this year.
On March 19, Nicole Gallacher, who was 22 weeks pregnant with her first child, had decided to stay home from work as the coronavirus pandemic ramped up across the city and country.
As she prepared to tidy up the house, the 31-year-old was suddenly struck with a horrible headache and tried to contact her husband, Dave Gallacher, a teacher who couldn’t get to his phone at the time.
Feeling that something was wrong, Nicole called her parents for help, but suddenly stopped speaking halfway through the call.
“While she was talking to them, she stopped communicating and collapsed on the ground in the living room,” Dave, 35, told Yahoo News Australia.
Her parents were able to call an ambulance and paramedics soon arrived to find the mum-to-be unresponsive and face down - forcing them to break into the house.
She was then rushed to Austin Hospital, in Heidelberg, where doctors discovered Nicole had an abnormal mass on her brain.
“It could have been there for several years but it just happened to burst and bleed on that day,” Dave said.
As she was rushed into surgery, Dave, who didn’t know what was wrong at the time, said he was brought in to say goodbye.
“It wasn’t until later on I realised how little chance they had given her to survive,” he said.
Husband told to ‘expect the worst’
During the procedure to stop the bleeding, the 31-year-old’s heart stopped working properly and she struggled to breathe properly after swallowing vomit when she collapsed.
Three hours into the surgery Dave said he got a phone call from one of her surgeons telling him to prepare himself because she wasn’t expected to make it.
The doctor also told the 35-year-old they had been forced to deliver the couple’s first child, a son named Ned, who was stillborn.
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After Nicole was stabilised and surgeons delayed her brain surgery for a later time, she was placed in a coma and on life support in the ICU, where Dave was able to hold Ned and place him on his mum’s stomach.
Weeks later when she awoke, Dave said the hardest thing was watching his wife, who couldn’t speak at the time, point to her stomach and lift her hand in the air as to ask what happened to their baby.
He waited until her intubation tube was removed and she could speak before he explained Ned had died.
“Telling her was hard, but that was the hardest thing, when she was doing that and I couldn’t even tell her,” he said.
Nicole was finally about to hold him before her second surgery in late April, during which doctors successfully removed the mass on her brain.
Making strides after mass removed
Unable to walk, sit up or feed herself, the 31-year-old was moved into a rehab hospital where she has been making strides for three months.
Dave said Nicole is now able to stand up on her own and move with a walking frame but has a long way to go.
He said she’s trying to stay positive despite being heartbroken over the loss of their child.
The situation has only been heightened by coronavirus, Dave said, which has limited the number of people she is allowed to see.
Because of the second lockdown Dave hasn’t been able to see his wife for two weeks.
“Mentally, the last couple of weeks have been tough,” he said of her isolation.
Hospital staff, family, friends and students provide support
However, Dave praised the hard work of the neurological nurses and “ICU angels”, who he said provided so much support and helped the couple through some very “difficult discussions when things were very hard emotionally”.
“I cannot speak highly enough of them,” he said.
A friend of the couple has since created a GoFundMe page for them to help pay for the increasing medical bills and renovations that will have to be made to their home so it is wheelchair accessible.
Dave said he’s been blown away and humbled by everyone’s generosity after initially being reluctant about the fundraiser.
Even some of the kids they teach have donated their pocket money, he said.
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