A mother who became severely ill after contracting Covid-19 while 36 weeks pregnant has finally returned home to her baby daughter after more than a year in hospital.
Nicoleta Tuna, 30, of Colchester in Essex, was unvaccinated when she caught coronavirus in October 2021.
Her condition quickly deteriorated and she was admitted to Colchester Hospital where her daughter Thea was delivered by emergency Caesarean.
The mum was then placed in a medically induced coma and in November 2021 she was transferred to Royal Papworth Hospital, a specialist heart and lung hospital in Cambridge, for advanced care.
She spent 299 days on an ECMO machine – a specialist intensive care life support machine which pumps oxygen into a patient’s blood – allowing the lungs to rest.
By the time she was woken from her coma in February 2022, Thea was nearly four months old. Nicoleta wasn’t strong enough to hold her for the first time until two whole months later.
Nicoleta, originally from Romania, spent so long in hospital that she learned English while on the ward, with the help of staff translating. She was finally discharged on Thursday, clapped from the ward by dozens of NHS staff who cared for her.
She was joined by her husband Mike, six-year-old son Eduard and daughter Thea, now aged one.
“After the C-section I remember nothing. I woke up and was being nursed by a Romanian healthcare support worker, and she spoke to me,” she says.
“I asked her ‘what day is it’ and she said ’22 February 2022’. I couldn’t believe it, it was too much. I was told my chances of survival were very small; nobody expected me to live. I was so, so poorly.”
Pregnant women were among the groups most likely to be hospitalised for Covid-19 at the height of the pandemic.
Data from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) from autumn 2021 suggested just 15% of pregnant women were fully vaccinated at the time.
Conspiracy theories were blamed for vaccine hesitancy, but the reality is that pregnant women received mixed messages about the jab earlier in the pandemic and clear, robust information about the safety of the vaccine was not distributed fast enough.
HuffPost UK reported incidences of pregnant women being dissuaded from having the vaccine by their midwives and vaccine volunteers. Misinformation was rife – and it some cases, it was deadly.
Although Nicoleta missed the first stages of her daughter’s life, she is still one of the lucky ones.
She remained on ECMO support until August 31, and in September she was slowly taken off the ventilator and onto a high flow form of oxygen, which she will continue to use at home.
“It has been very difficult as I have not been able to spend time with my daughter or my six-year-old son, but I can now spend the rest of my life with them and my husband thanks to all of the people at Royal Papworth,” she says.
“I didn’t speak any English when I was first admitted, but all of the staff here have helped me in many ways including helping me with my English as well as throwing a (first birthday) party for Thea which was just amazing.
“While I was in critical care, the staff wrote well wishes in a notebook for me which I will treasure forever. They have all written beautiful words; they are now my second family.
“My wish is to live with my kids and see them grow up, something I didn’t think I would get the chance to do.”