Kayleigh Summers tells PEOPLE that she wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for her doctors’ quick thinking and this specific medical device.
When Kayleigh Summers gave birth to her son, she never expected she’d be the one spending the next 14 days in the hospital. Doctors discovered that she likely had something called an amniotic fluid embolism (AFE) during childbirth, which is an unpreventable, unpredictable and often fatal obstetric complication.
“[AFE] typically happens really, really quickly, rapidly as it did in my case,” says Summers. “So there are two phases that kind of make up an amniotic fluid embolism. One being that cardiopulmonary collapse, which I had already experienced, and then something else called DIC, disseminated intravascular coagulopathy.”
Summers says that, at this point in her health journey, her doctors were pretty sure she wasn’t going to survive. Her doctors realized they would need to do something pretty dramatic and ended up calling over to a different hospital to ambulance over ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, which is the highest form of life support.
Doctors hoped to get Summers off ECMO, but her heart wasn’t recovering in the way they wanted. They tried every medication they could think of, but eventually ran out of options. Finally, doctors told Summers’ family that they could try one last thing — an Impella CP, the world’s smallest heart pump.
“[My doctor] described it to my family as a tiny windmill-like device that would go up through my femoral artery into my left ventricle to offload my heart and give it the chance to rest and hopefully recover,” says Summers. “She let them know that if it didn’t work, they were unfortunately out of options.”
Her Impella was placed at 5 a.m. on a Thursday morning — her cardiac event had taken place midday on Wednesday, and 36 hours later, she was doing so well on the Impella that she was able to come off of all support.
