Woman Recovers From Coma, Holds Her Baby for First Time

Janette Nadesan slipped into a coma just days after giving birth, before she could ever hold her new daughter.

For more than three months, her husband, Aru, sat at her bedside playing the baby’s tape-recorded coos and gurgles, trying to coax his wife back into consciousness.

Slowly, she began to come to, and, on Friday, she held her daughter, Anna Marie, for the first time.

“I see miracles every now and then,” said Dr. Jesse Hall, professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Hospitals. “It kind of rejuvenates everyone.”

Janette Nadesan’s medical odyssey began at St. Margaret Mercy Health Care Centers in Hammond, Ind., where she was diagnosed with severe pre-eclampsia, a hypertensive pregnancy disorder.

She gave birth in an emergency Cesarean section Feb. 28 and two days later doctors performed a hysterectomy in an attempt to stop massive internal bleeding.

After the surgery, Janette Nadesan slipped into a coma, never having held her baby.

She was airlifted to the Chicago hospital March 15 suffering from respiratory failure and problems with her kidneys and liver.

Doctors placed her on life support. More than once doctors told Aru Nadesan his wife was close to death.

“I tell you, I am very blessed,” he said in Saturday’s editions of the Chicago Tribune. “What pulled me through this is my kids, just being able to come home and see them. They’re too young to know what was going on, but I had to be there for them.”