Mother and baby revived after dying during child birth

Denver - Mike Hermanstorfer was clutching his pregnant wife's hand in a Colorado Springs hospital on Christmas Eve when she stopped breathing, her life apparently slipping away. Then he cradled his newborn son's limp body seconds after a medical team delivered the baby by caesarean section. Minutes later, his son showed signs of life in his arms under the feverish attention of doctors. Then he learned his wife had inexplicably started breathing again.

"My legs went out from underneath me," Hermanstorfer said. "I had everything in the world taken from me, and in an hour and a half I had everything given to me."

Hermanstorfer's wife, Tracy, went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing during labor Thursday, said Dr. Stephanie Martin, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Memorial Hospital.

"She had no signs of life. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, she wasn't breathing," said Martin, who had rushed to Tracy Hermanstorfer's room to help. "The baby was, it was basically limp, with a very slow heart rate."

Both mother and baby appear healthy now with no sign of problems, Martin said, adding that she cannot explain the mother's cardiac arrest or the recovery. Mike Hermanstorfer credits "the hand of God."

"We are both believers . . . but this right here, even a nonbeliever -- you explain to me how this happened," he said. "There is no other explanation."

Tracy Hermanstorfer, 33, was getting prepped for childbirth at the hospital Thursday morning and her 37-year-old husband was by her side when she began to feel sleepy and laid back in her bed.

"I was holding her hand when we realized she was gone," Mike Hermanstorfer said. "My entire life just rolled out."

Doctors told him: "We're going to take your son out now. We have been unable to revive her, and we're going to take your son out," he recalled. After the C-section, some of the doctors rushed his wife to the operating room while the others attended to the baby, Coltyn.

"They hand him to me, he's absolutely lifeless," Hermanstorfer said. The doctors went to work on the boy as Hermanstorfer held him, and soon he began to breathe.

"His life began in my hands," Hermanstorfer said. "That's a feeling like none other. Life actually began in the palm of my hands."

Martin said Tracy Hermanstorfer's pulse returned even before she was wheeled out of the room and into surgery. Martin estimates she had no heartbeat for about four minutes. Tracy Hermanstorfer remembers getting sleepy and closing her eyes in her hospital bed, then awakening in intensive care.

"I just felt like I was asleep," she said.

The Hermanstorfers live in Security, near Colorado Springs....how touching! Miracles happen everyday :-)