CONCORD, North Carolina, September 23, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Shelly Cawley, a nursing student, and husband Jeremy Cawley, a YMCA director, weren’t trying to get pregnant, but they weren’t trying not to.
When Shelly found out she was pregnant with their first child, she and husband Jeremy were very excited. “Having a child with the person you love is such a big deal,” Shelly said.
The couple planned a natural delivery, and they attended weekly classes on natural childbirth. “We knew what we were going to do,” Shelly explained, but “then, all of the sudden that plan was taken away from me.”
At eight months’ gestation, doctors discovered a blood clot in Shelly’s leg, so they began giving Shelly blood thinners.
Eventually, Shelly’s water broke, and Jeremy took her to the hospital. But labor did not progress.
Shelly had preeclampsia, a disorder characterized by high blood pressure and too much protein in the urine. Preeclampsia, if untreated, can lead to liver and kidney dysfunction, and fluid in the lungs. Shelly was also diagnosed with HELLP syndrome, a life-threatening condition involving the rupture of red blood cells, elevated liver enzymes, and a low platelet count.
Doctors told Shelly her baby had to be delivered immediately by emergency C-section.
Going in for an emergency delivery, Shelly had “a premonition.” “I was telling the doctors that I was scared I wasn’t going to wake up,” she said.
She didn’t.
The C-section was successful, and Rylan Grace Cawley was born. But Shelly failed to recover. As Jeremy was holding his newborn daughter, doctors informed him that Shelly’s lungs were filling with fluid and she was having trouble breathing on her own.
Eventually, Shelly fell into a coma. Physicians later discovered that the baby inside her womb had been holding Shelly’s blood clot in place and, when Rylan was delivered, the clot migrated to Shelly’s lung, causing a pulmonary embolism.
Shelly’s blood pressure was 60/40, and her heart rate was over 180 beats a minute. She was hooked up to what doctors called “the last-chance ventilator,” pumping air into her lungs so violently that it rattled her hospital bed, husband Jeremy said.
Doctors were convinced they could only wait and see if Shelly would wake up from the coma. “The doctors had done all they could and it was clear, they absolutely thought they were losing her at this point,” Jeremy said.
That was when the doctors decided to bring the family together. “We didn’t know how she was going to make it,” nurse Ashley Manus told the Washington Post.
The medical staff at Carolinas HealthCare System Northeast use the “skin-to-skin” method to strengthen the mother-baby bond. The physical touch stimulates the newborn’s brain development, stabilizes heart rate, and helps maintain body temperature. Nurse Manus suggested to lay little Rylan on Shelly’s chest. “If that was going to be it for her, we wanted to be able to tell the baby: ‘Your mom held you,'” she reasoned.
“Maybe somewhere in Shelly’s subconscious, she would hear her baby was calling out to her,” Manus said. “We just thought, it can’t hurt, [so we] might as well give it a try.”
Nurses brought little newborn Rylan into Shelly’s room. “I was hoping somewhere deep down, Shelly was still there and could feel her baby, hear her baby and her mother’s instincts would come out,” Manus anticipated.
Jeremy explained that the “hope was that if Shelly could smell the baby, feel the baby, hear the baby – even in the coma – it would give her a reason to fight. They needed her to start to fight.”
They put the newborn on her mother’s chest, but tiny Rylan went right to sleep. “We pinched Rylan and tickled her a little bit so that Shelly would hear her cry,” Jeremy shared.
And then, little Rylan – on her mommy’s chest – cried.
As soon as her baby cried, Shelly’s vitals jumped.
Jeremy said Rylan made the difference in saving her mother’s life. “All the doctors said there’s no way they would have gotten to that point if Shelly hadn’t made it through [that] night,” he said.
Doctors kept Shelly in her coma so that she could get the care she needed, including 21 units of blood, ventilators, and a heart-and-lung bypass machine. As the week-long ordeal continued, Jeremy put Rylan in a t-shirt of Shelly’s, so Rylan could smell her mother. He even learned how to pump his wife’s breast milk. “It was such an emotional and spiritual journey for our family while she was gone,” Jeremy said. “God’s hand was all over everything.”
Finally, Shelly awakened. Jeremy first asked her “if she knew who I was…, if she knew my name – and with the most breathy voice she said my name,” Jeremy Cawley said. “It was just such a huge thing.”
Then, Jeremy brought one-week-old Rylan in to her mother. Shelly “still couldn’t move,” Jeremy explained, “but you could see her eyes – as soon as I brought in Rylan, her eyes locked on Rylan. She just stared at her. And I laid Rylan on her chest.”
As the Washington Post reports, Jeremy brushed the hair from Shelly’s forehead and asked her a question: “Are you happy?”
Shelly nodded yes.
“I’ve got stories to tell you,” he said.
Religious-Freedom Message: Pope Makes Surprise Stop at Little Sisters of the Poor
‘This is a sign, obviously, of support’ for the nuns’ HHS mandate court case, papal spokesman Father Federico Lombardi affirmed at an evening press conference.
Pope Francis converses Sept. 23 with Sister Marie Mathilde, a 102-year-old member of the Little Sisters of the Poor’s community in Washington.
– Courtesy Little Sisters of the Poor
WASHINGTON — Pope Francis paid a short visit to the Little Sisters of the Poor community in Washington on Wednesday to support them in their court case over the contraception mandate, the Vatican’s spokesman revealed.
It was a “short visit that was not in the program,” Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See Press Office, said at an evening press conference during the papal visit to the nation’s capital.
“This is a sign, obviously, of support for them” in their court case, he affirmed.
The sisters had filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration for its 2012 mandate that employers provide insurance coverage for birth control, sterilizations and drugs that can cause abortions employee health plans. The sisters have maintained that to provide this coverage would violate their religious beliefs.
After the Obama administration modified the rules as an “accommodation” for objecting organizations, the sisters held that even under the revised rules they would have to violate their consciences.
The majority of a three-judge panel for the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in July that the Little Sisters of the Poor did not establish that the mandate was a “substantial burden” on their free exercise of religion, and thus ruled they still had to abide by the mandate.
“The Holy Father spoke to each of us individually, from the youngest postulant to our centenarian, and then he spoke to all of us about the importance of our ministry to the elderly,” Sister Constance Veit, communications director for the Little Sisters of the Poor, said following the visit. “We were deeply moved by his encouraging words.”
Mark Rienzi, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the Little Sisters of the Poor in their court challenge against the mandate, said in a email statement, “Today, after Mass at the basilica, the Pope made an unscheduled visit to the Little Sisters of the Poor, where he spoke to each of the sisters privately and encouraged them in their vocation to serve the elderly and the poor. Earlier in the day, at the White House, the Pope expressed his support for religious liberty when he stated: [We] all are called to be vigilant, precisely as good citizens, to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it.”
‘An Important Meaning’
The papal visit was not on the official schedule for Pope Francis’ Washington visit, which included Wednesday visits to the White House, a midday prayer service with the U.S. bishops at St. Matthew’s Cathedral and the canonization Mass for St. Junipero Serra at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
It was a “little addition to the program, but I think it has an important meaning,” Father Lombardi said.
He added that the visit “is connected” to “the words that the Pope has said in support of the position of the bishops of the United States in the speech to President Obama and also in the speech to the bishops.”
Pope Francis, with President Obama at the White House, called religious freedom “one of America’s most precious possessions” and hearkened to the U.S. bishops’ defense of religious freedom. “All are called to be vigilant, precisely as good citizens, to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it,” he had said.
In response to the news of the visit with the sisters, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., president of the U.S. Conference of Catholics Bishops, said that he was “so pleased” to hear of the visit.
“As you know, the last thing the Little Sisters of the Poor want to do is sue somebody. They don’t want to sue in court,” he insisted. “They simply want to serve people who are poor and elderly, and they want to do it in a way that doesn’t conflict with their beliefs.”
The archbishop had previously warned against “interpreting freedom of religion in a very narrow way” in the press conference and emphasized that religion is not something practiced just for an hour on Sunday, but something lived out. To prove his point, he used the Little Sisters as an example.
Added Archbishop Kurtz, “We need to make room within our nation for people who have deeply held religious beliefs not to be forced to do that.”
Register staff contributed to this report.
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