A pregnant woman from Calgary, Canada, was ready to start her new life as a mom, not knowing she’d be fighting for her life just two weeks later.
Arianne Jones, 34, gave birth to a healthy baby boy on January 22. During labor, she suffered a second-degree tear on her perineum after the umbilical cord had been wrapped around her son’s neck and was monitored overnight.
Her husband, 42-year-old Jeff Christie, was by her side, and the family of three were able to go home the next morning.
“Everything was pretty normal… until it wasn’t,” Jones told Newsweek.
Jones, a former Olympic tobogganer, was rushed to the postpartum unit with an unexplained infection. “That’s when stuff started devolving quite rapidly,” Christie recalled.
After 48 hours, Jones’s blood pressure was dangerously low and she was admitted to the intensive care unit where she spent the next 21 days in an induced coma and 29 days on a ventilator.
“Everyone was trying their best, but no one knew what was going on. It was the absolute worst,” Christie said.
Eventually, after intense reading and researching, doctors identified the cause: a rare bacterial infection with only 50 documented cases worldwide.
They also explained that, at the time, there were only two people known to have survived the infection by removing their uteruses.
Christie told Newsweek that his wife’s blood profiles were in such dire condition, the doctors weren’t sure they could perform the life-saving surgeries she so desperately needed.
With their son, River, at home, the new dad told Newsweek that he became a “mass project manager” over the next few weeks. Family flew in from different states to help with childcare while Christie could be in the hospital to support his wife.
“I called my parents, and I was just like, guys, Arianne’s going to the ICU. I have no idea what’s going on, I need you to raise River. I need to focus on my wife,” he said.
Jones had 12 surgeries in total, including the removal of her uterus and ovaries. After months of trial and error, the doctors had finally sourced control of the infection.
Jones told Newsweek that her first memory is waking up in the hospital. “I had a breathing tube in and couldn’t move any muscle in my body,” she said. “That was the most terrifying moment of my life.”
Post-surgery, Jones had to relearn basic functions, such as breathing and swallowing.
She’s had to do months of work to regain some key internal functions as well as movement in her body, but after 125 days, Jones has been discharged from the hospital.
She told Newsweek that they’ve been through all kinds of emotions, from feeling robbed of the magic of being new parents to anger at the situation.
“We’ve gone through a lot of anger, like, why us? Why me? There’s no answer to that,” she said. “But also, there’s a lot of gratitude. I think we just have very different perspectives on life. We’re not sweating the small stuff for sure.”
Christie recalled a touching moment between the two of them a week after she regained her voice.
“[Arianne] said, ‘I’m really sorry for this process has made you a single parent for so long.’ And I looked back at her and said, ‘It’s the exact opposite. Because you fought so hard, you didn’t make me a single parent.’”
While Jones still needs to process it all, she told Newsweek that she has a newfound sense of clarity on life.
“[Our] new mantra we’ve been going off is if something’s not a hell yes, it’s a no,” she said.
Sharing awareness and factual information on her platform about the infection has also a become new purpose.
“The more that we can get the knowledge out there, then maybe we can help someone else,” Christie said.
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