New Texas Mom Required 35 Gallons Of Blood
SAN ANTONIO (AP) - A San Antonio woman has amazed her doctors by surviving a seemingly endless hemorrhage that required transfusions of 540 units of blood and blood products -- or about 35 gallons.
At a news conference Wednesday, Gina Walker, her husband and new daughter, Addison, returned to University Hospital in San Antonio to thank the team of doctors, nurses, technicians and hospital staff members that saved her life in February.
"Up until Gina's surgery, we have not ever transfused that much blood to a patient, said hospital blood bank chief Sherrie Warner.
"I would use the word 'miracle' to describe what's happened with her, there's no doubt," said Dr. Jason Parker, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the leader of Walker's medical team.
Walker, pregnant with her fifth child, developed a rare complication called placenta percreta, where the blood link between mother and fetus tapped into her bladder and major blood vessels along her uterine wall, the San Antonio Express-News reported.
Walker was admitted in labor on Feb. 15, the complication required a cesarean section and a hysterectomy, Parker said. The delivery went well, but with the hysterectomy surgeons "encountered catastrophic hemorrhage," he said.
Trauma surgeons were summoned as reinforcements as the bleeding problem snowballed. "One of the difficulties with losing a lot of blood is you also lose clotting factors when you lose blood," said Dr. Kevin Hall, chief of gynecological oncology at the medical school.
"And for a brief period, we were able to get the hemorrhage under control enough to complete the operation we intended to do. And then, just as we were close to the completion of that operation, she started to bleed massively again," he said.
Surgeons quickly went through the 30 units of B-positive blood they had ordered. In the blood bank, Warner scrambled to locate every unit of B-positive, then O-positive, blood she could find.
"We never stopped," she said. "We knew it was an OB patient, and there was a baby involved."
Meanwhile, outside the operating room in a corridor, Walker's husband, Dustin Walker, was waiting through what he expected to be a 3- to 4-hour operation.
"Come about the sixth hour, after I watched cooler after cooler after cooler with my wife's name on it, full of blood, going up and down the hallways, I started getting worried," he said.
Not only was it amazing that Gina Walker survived the ordeal, but survived it without any major complications, Parker said.
As for the mother, "I know that a true miracle has happened," Walker said, looking at her new daughter. "She's feisty and a fighter. She's tough and strong-willed already."
(© Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
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