Mom credits ‘miracle baby’ for saving her life during rare, life-threatening heart condition

Amanda Banic, a 35-year-old Michigan mom, was 35 weeks pregnant with her first baby and having what she described as an easy pregnancy. Then, she started having chest pains. Worried she was having a heart attack, she went to the emergency room, where she was monitored for a few hours and sent home with a “diagnosis of indigestion and anxiety.” 

Days later, the chest pains returned, this time with pain that extended to her jaw, and blurred vision.

“I just felt in that moment that this was it. I think I’m dying,” Banic told Good Morning America. “I didn’t know how else to explain it. I had just never felt anything like it.”

Even though the pain was severe, she was hesitant to go back to the ER, worried they’d just send her home again. But her husband insisted, and this time, when they arrived, doctors immediately medevaced Banic to a larger hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, more than 80 miles from her home in Hartford.

There, she learned that she had an aortic dissection, a rare, life-threatening tear in her aorta, the main artery that pumps blood away from the heart to the rest of the body.

“I don’t think I even realized really what was happening until I got to Grand Rapids and was rolled into the operating room and it was just packed to the gills with doctors and nurses and techs,” Banic said. “Then it hit me that it was a pretty serious situation. The very last thing I remember saying was, ‘Just please make sure I get to meet my baby.”

Dr. Erin Fricke was one of the 20-person medical team ready to meet and treat Banic when she arrived at the hospital in Grand Rapids.

“There are just not very many people who present as far in pregnancy with such an acute situation,” Fricke said. “I remember thinking how terrified she must be. She came wheeled into the operating room on the stretcher, and I went right to her side and I said, ‘I’m Dr. Fricke. I’m going to be the one to help take care of you and deliver your baby.'”

Over a span of 24 hours, Banic underwent an emergency C-section to deliver her daughter, Baylor, who was born healthy on May 9 — then two open heart surgeries: an an aortic dissection repair, a 13-hour operation to repair her aorta, and a triple bypass to reroute blood around her heart arteries. She then spent a week on life support, while her husband criss-crossed the hospital, seeing her and their newborn daughter, who spent time in the NICU after being born premature.

“He had a pretty new pair of tennis shoes, and he literally wore a hole in the bottom of this pair of tennis shoes because he walked, basically ran, so much during my stay at the hospital, back and forth,” Banic said. “We had tried for this baby for a couple of years, and for him to have to be thrown into fatherhood the way that he was, and him not knowing if he was going to have to raise her alone, it was just terrible.”

While Banic was unconscious, nurses would hold Baylor up to her so she could feel the baby’s skin on hers.

“Some of the only times I would react on life support was when they would do skin-to-skin with [Baylor], and apparently I would cry when they would do that,” she said. “Love is a powerful thing, and the bond between a mother and a baby, it’s unreal.”

Banic was taken off life support — and able to finally meet Baylor for the first time — on Mother’s Day, May 14.

She says that Baylor is part of the reason she’s still here today.

“Because of the way I dissected, she kind of was in there, essentially holding everything together,” Banic said. “Had she not been in there putting the pressure on all the right places, my outcome may have been very different, so she’s kind of a little miracle, in more more ways than one.”

Now, the family is home together, happy, healthy, and looking forward to Baylor’s first birthday in the spring.

“I’ve dreamed about these days, but they are just beyond precious,” Banic said. “I don’t take a single day for granted. Every day seems like a holiday for us. I just take advantage of every single day.”