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Marisa Hutchinson had her daughter, Bianca Arnold, when she was just 21 years old.
Arnold grew up and had her own daughters, Layla and Anastasia, but just two weeks after giving birth to her youngest, Arnold fell ill with COVID.
After that, Hutchinson found herself stepping up to take care of her young granddaughters while also fighting for doctors to save her own daughter’s life.
One night, after Arnold gave birth to her second daughter, she went in to change her in the middle of the night and said she could barely stand up. Arnold was turning blue and rushed to the hospital in Toledo, diagnosed with COVID.
Arnold was intubated, then put into a coma, her mother said. Doctors told Hutchinson to consider making plans for her daughter’s funeral.
Hutchinson recalls the last words her daughter spoke to her before she was intubated and put into a coma at a hospital in Toledo: “I’m sorry, mommy.”
“There’s no way I was going to let that be our last conversation,” she said. “When somebody tells you to plan your child’s funeral, that’s not going to happen. You’ll do whatever. I would’ve taken her place if I could’ve.”
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A family friend pushed her to ask doctors about ECMO, artificial life support that helps people whose lungs and heart are malfunctioning.
She had seen commercials for the Cleveland Clinic, so she decided to reach out and plead for doctors there to save her daughter’s life. She sent hospital staff photos of her daughter and told them Arnold had both a 15-month daughter and a newborn.
“I guess what I was hoping for, and it worked, is tugging on somebody’s heartstrings,” said Hutchinson, Arnold’s mother.
Clinic staff heard Hutchinson’s pleas. According to the clinic, all cases are presented to case managers based on availability and the patient’s status of illness. On Oct. 30, her daughter was flown to the Cleveland Clinic.
Hutchinson took care of her granddaughters while her daughter was in a coma for 40 days and hospitalized for another 40 days after waking up.
Hutchinson was hours away from the Cleveland Clinic while her daughter was in a coma. While Arnold was hospitalized, clinic staff decorated her room and made sure her mother could talk to her on the phone.
“Even when Bianca was in the coma, I knew in my heart that she heard us,” Hutchinson said. “The nurses would hold the phone up to Bianca’s ear and I would tell her things … I knew that she could hear us and I knew she was in good hands.”
Daelle Waldron-Gearhart, a nurse manager at the clinic, said Arnold was admitted during a dark time where families were desperately looking for help.
“At that time, visitation was still really limited so with the use of our nurse coordinators, we were able to get Bianca settled in, stabilized on ECMO, and then be able to connect with her mother.”
They also wanted to give her “the most healing environment” possible and make sure she woke up in the best space, so they decorated the room for her, Waldron-Gearhart said.
Arnold woke up just before Thanksgiving.
While in a coma, she remembers having nightmares initially and then dreams about being hospitalized. When she woke up and someone entered her room, the first thing she asked was “How did this happen?”
She recalls feeling depressed when she first woke up because she missed her girls.
“I was away from my brand new child,” she said. “My oldest is only 15 months. They were babies and I was ripped away from them.”
But the staff at the Cleveland Clinic did all they could to keep her motivated.
“There was an aide who braided my hair for me,” Arnold said. “There was a nurse that cleaned me up and said ‘Let’s do your nails.’”
Hutchinson, Arnold’s mother, said the clinic staff that cared for her daughter became family.
Their kindness meant so much to the family that Arnold asked to meet them after she woke up and was discharged from the hospital.
Arnold reached out to the clinic in April 2023 to update them and tell them she would be returning to Cleveland to follow up with some doctors.
For Arnold, a former social worker, it was important to let the healthcare professionals who cared for her know how much their work matters. She also wanted to be able to tell families facing similar health scares that there is a way out.
“I had a 2% chance to live and I’m here,” Arnold said. “There is hope and it’s just having the right support to get through it.”
A clinic spokesperson called her back and told her he’d like to set up a reunion for her with the staff that cared for her. When the date finally came, Arnold was nervous.
“I had a little bit of a panic attack there,” she said. “The girl that was the coordinator of the unit, she’s like, ‘Here, take my hand. We’re going to do this together.’”
As Arnold walked through the clinic’s hallway on April 20, 2023, the nurse manager held her hand.
“It was quite evident that for her, she wanted to come back to where she spent so much more time on life support,” Waldron-Gearhart, the nurse manager, told USA TODAY. “When she came up here, it was important that we walked through the unit and had that moment of healing where she could see that room.”
“I thought that was really amazing to see her walk through there, and then to get to see the whole team that cared for her,” she said. “There is that survival. You can leave the hospital and you can have a very meaningful, impactful life.”
For Arnold, that can still feel like a long-term goal. Some tasks are difficult or impossible to do these days, like getting down on the floor to play with her daughters, carrying her daughter and a lack of feeling in her left leg. She’s also fatigued a lot and can’t work.
“Before, I was nine months pregnant working a job as a social worker,” she said. “I was always a high energy person and now I’m fatigued all the time. It’s hard for me to do things. But like I said, I’m here for my kids and that’s what’s important. At the end of the day, everything I’ve been through to be able to be here for my girls is what matters the most.”
Being a mother means sacrificing and putting your children first, Arnold says.
It means doing anything for her children, and she said she’s doing the same thing her parents and grandparents did for her. She recalled the times where her parents went without to provide for her and her sister.
Being a mother also means constantly working to do better, she said.
“I’m still learning every day,” Arnold said. “I still call my mom.”
Her mother, Hutchinson, cried as she recalled raising Arnold and her sister.
“You’re just like ‘Wow, I created that life,’” she said. “It’s the best feeling in the world. It just makes you complete.”
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