Estimated read time: 11-12 minutes
SPRINGVILLE — One year ago, Sadie Harris almost died from a serious infection she contracted following the birth of her first baby. An emergency hysterectomy, and several other factors that the couple considers miracles, saved her life.
Now, her mother has stepped in to carry Sadie's next baby.
Just over a year ago, Ben and Sadie Harris were preparing to welcome their first baby to the world.
"It was two weeks before my due date," Sadie Harris said. "James was born the next morning at 6:17 a.m. I had a super easy pregnancy, a normal delivery. We were in the hospital for two days and then we came home and we were home for a week."
However, after that week, Sadie Harris knew something was wrong.
"The following Sunday, May 21, I woke up with some severe cramping," she said.
The pain got worse throughout the day and by the evening, she had trouble walking. So Ben Harris and Sadie Harris headed to the emergency room. Doctors believed Sadie Harris had endometritis, an infection after giving birth, and put her on antibiotics.
She didn't improve.
"It wasn't making sense. My kidneys were starting to fail. I couldn't keep any food down," Sadie said.
Sadie Harris' father, David Tullis, was an emergency room doctor for 10 years. Feeling helpless, he began to search for answers to her unique symptoms.
"She didn't have blood flow to her extremities, and so it couldn't get an accurate reading of the oxygen through that pulse oximeter and so essentially it started dipping — and the nurse was a little bit panicked," Ben Harris said. "Her dad was in the room. He knew that it wasn't a good reading."
"My dad knew that it was something more serious and that was part of the reason he really wanted me to get to the ICU because he was like, 'This is not normal, and she's just getting rounded on once a day, as if she's recovering and she's not recovering. Every day, she's getting worse,'" Sadie Harris said.
Her symptoms became so serious, the nurse called a code for her to be taken to the ICU. Doctors performed surgery to find out what was wrong and drained over a liter of fluid from her abdomen in the process.
"There was all this fluid happening from the infection, my cramping was going, I was still really severe. And then I was throwing up everything," Sadie Harris said. "So I hadn't eaten since I got to the hospital."
A dangerous condition
Sadie Harris' dad and OB-GYN discovered her symptoms lined up with a bacterial infection women can contract after giving birth, and doctors confirmed she had that dangerous bacteria called Clostridium sordellii.
"That is super, super rare, but it's a bacteria that like 10-ish percent of women just have in their natural vaginal flora. There's a lot of bacteria down there to help maintain health and everything, and it can be really dangerous when it gets to the uterus and only has that chance when you're dilated during delivery or some other sort of procedure, it can get there," Sadie Harris said.
What Sadie's dad didn't tell her is that Clostridium sordellii is almost always fatal.
"As he's looking at this, he finds that in postpartum women, this bacteria has a 100% mortality rate. And in people who have shock onset already, it's also a 100% mortality rate," Sadie Harris said. "The next day I started to go into shock."
Sadie's OB-GYN informed her if she didn't improve by the next morning, her best chance at survival was an emergency hysterectomy to remove her uterus.
"Obviously, that's like a pretty life-changing thing to happen after your first baby, and when you have hopes of having more kids, and we're pretty young," Sadie Harris said.
She said she wasn't really able to process the news right then because she was so sick and weak. Her memories from her time in the hospital are blurry and limited. Her husband, on the other hand, remembers it all perfectly.
"I kind of felt like I was processing it on my own because she was there, but she wasn't really there to like mourn it. But at the same time, it was like, now we felt like her life was at risk, and I just felt like whatever it takes, like, we'll do it," Ben Harris said.
Sadie Harris' labs the next morning revealed her condition was worsening and the surgery was urgent.
"Before I went into the hysterectomy, my dad basically said bye to me," Sadie Harris said. "He knew the odds. He knew that most people didn't make it with this to day five. And at this point, my body was so weak, I hadn't eaten in six days. I've talked to him (Tullis) about that moment, he said that I asked him, 'Am I going to die?' And he said he couldn't say no to me. All he could say was, 'You're in really bad shape and you really need the surgery.'"
But Sadie Harris defied the odds and survived the hysterectomy. She and her family breathed a sigh of relief believing the worst was behind them.
Then doctors found the fluid in her lungs.
The next hurdle
"I also still had a lot of fluid around my abdomen and around my lungs," Sadie Harris said. "They decided to do something called thoracentesis, where they drain that fluid from around your lungs."
The first side was successful, but a day or two later when they did the other side, Sadie had a rare complication called flash pulmonary edema.
"It's is a really rare complication of the procedure that happens when your fluid in your body switches too quickly," she said. "My lungs essentially began to fill with fluid."
Once again, her situation became extremely dire.
"As you can imagine, if your lungs are filled with fluid it's like you're drowning from the inside out," Sadie Harris said.
Her oxygen levels dropped and then dropped again.
Ben Harris said his wife began to experience a bit of ICU delirium and frequently became panicked and confused. She had to be restrained by family members while doctors worked to drain the fluid.
Finally, doctors determined she needed to be intubated. Her family was forced to leave.
"Her oxygen's getting worse. It was in the 50s, and then in the 40s — and if you stay there for an hour or two, or more, there's a chance you could sustain brain damage," Ben Harris said.
That's when he reached out for support.
"That was a night that we had so many people praying, because one of the first things I did when they kicked us out of the room was put on my story, 'If you see this, please pray for Sadie right now, she's not doing good,'" Ben Harris said. "I've heard stories since, like my extended family, it was Memorial Day and they were at a BBQ, and they just all kneeled down and prayed for her."
Ben Harris said he sat in the waiting room, staring at the swinging doors for anyone to bring him news about his wife.
Sadie defies odds once again
"Eventually, I just walked back in and she'd been flipped over and her oxygen was back up to 88, which is still low but definitely safe, and I remember just looking up again ... and just feeling so much mercy and so grateful that God would save her again," Ben Harris said.
Sadie doesn't remember a lot, but she remembers being aware of the surgeries she'd had.
"I knew that I'd had a hysterectomy. I knew that I was intubated, but it's interesting because I don't remember those things actually happening," Sadie Harris said. "But coming out of it, I knew I had a huge incision that was like bleeding and I knew I didn't want to look at it because I was like grossed out."
Later that morning doctors determined Sadie's oxygen was doing well and extubated her. She spent several days recovering and finally got to be reunited with her newborn baby, James.
"I remember getting to the recovery floor and like everything just kind of hit: All of these emotions of like, 'Oh my gosh, I just survived something that nobody has survived,' and feeling like, 'How did that happen?' and then feeling so grateful like, 'I have this baby and I get to be with him,'" Sadie Harris said.
Sharing their miracle
Sadie and Ben Harris both became emotional when mentioning the many miracles they witnessed during their harrowing hospital experience. They expressed how people prayed and fasted for Sadie, and how family and friends brought them dozens of gifts and packages and trinkets to take their minds off their hospital stay. Sadie's aunt paid for Sadie's dad and husband to stay at a hotel near the hospital; her OB-GYN skipped a vacation to be with her and monitor her condition.
"It's just so humbling to be the recipient of that, because I don't think there's many people that get to be the recipient of thousands and thousands and thousands of people across the world praying for you. I really feel strongly now that those prayers are felt from the receiver's end," Sadie Harris said.
"I think it's hard sometimes to share this knowing that a lot of people don't get a miracle, and a lot of people pray just as hard or have just as many people praying for them and things don't turn out," Ben Harris said. "But we don't want to stop either, because it's so inspiring to see how it can just create hope in people."
A unique second pregnancy
As she improved, the weight of the hysterectomy and what that would mean for her future family began to sink in.
"There was one or two days when it kind of hit me like, 'Oh my gosh, I just had a hysterectomy' and like it was really heavy. And like I cried for a few hours, but it also felt so good to cry and have the emotional energy to like process everything that had happened," Sadie Harris said.
Since her ovaries were not infected, doctors told Sadie she'd have the option to have more kids through surrogacy if she wanted to.
"We've always wanted several kids, we've always wanted a bigger family, and my dream has always been to be a mom, so that felt comforting to know that there was an option," Sadie Harris said.
Her mom, Myndie Tullis, offered to be a surrogate for the next baby.
"While I was in my hysterectomy, my mom had a really strong impression that she was going to carry our next baby," Sadie Harris said.
As Sadie recovered in the months that followed, she and Ben looked into the possibility of surrogacy.
"We had to meet with the lawyer, we had to meet with the counselor, we had to find a fertility clinic, and so we started making all of those appointments in October I think and we had most of those first appointments in November, and we started IVF the last week of December," Sadie said.
Ben and Sadie are now expecting a little girl. Myndie Tullis is 18 and a half weeks pregnant with her soon-to-be granddaughter.
"She said like 'Hey like I will do this for you but just so you know I want to do it before I turn 50' and she's 48 right now," Sadie said. "She's been really really tired, but besides that she's been so determined and just like super positive about it."
While this form of pregnancy is a unique way to grow their family, Sadie's grateful that her mom is the surrogate.
"It's been really cool to have my mom be the one to carry the baby - I get to talk to her every day, I get to go to the appointments with her and I'm just so glad the baby gets to hear her voice and get any part of her that she can for the next nine months," Sadie said.
The baby will be born the week of Thanksgiving.
"Honestly, thinking about it, it's so special to have a baby at Thanksgiving, there's so much to be grateful for," Sadie said.
"I don't know if the prayer always makes the miracle obviously a lot of people pray and don't get that miracle but for us it's just been such a testament that with God nothing is impossible," Ben said. "He's not a God of statistics He's not a God that's confined by this 100% mortality rates, single survivor cases, if He wants someone to be here He'll make sure it happens and we feel so lucky we got that second miracle."
