Brazilian nurse Rusia Goes last month gave birth while unconscious and breathing through a ventilator tube as she battled severe COVID-19 symptoms.
It would be nearly a month before the 42-year-old was reunited with her newborn daughter.
“Only God knows how much I missed that little one, who had been inside me, and all of a sudden was taken out because of all of this,” she said in an interview on Monday.
Photo: Reuters
While Goes normally works as a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, she stayed home when the pandemic started, but her husband, Ednaldo Goes, suspects he might have transmitted the coronavirus to her as he continued to go out to work and shop for the family.
When Rusia Goes checked into a Rio de Janeiro hospital with shortness of breath and other symptoms of COVID-19, she was just beginning the eighth month of her pregnancy.
Doctors recommended a premature birth by caesarean section to better treat the mother’s condition.
The baby tested negative for the coronavirus and was isolated from Rusia Goes, who was transferred to another hospital after her condition worsened.
Rusia Goes said that the battle with the respiratory disease was hard and “very painful,” but slowly she was able to recover.
She first met her daughter, Luisa, virtually, via a videoconference with her husband and the baby in another hospital.
Rusia Goes was finally released from hospital after two weeks and first met her daughter in person on May 20 — 26 days after giving birth.
Masked medical staff gathered with balloons and applauded as she left the hospital with her baby in her arms.
“To hold her to my chest was so emotional,” she said.
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