Masina Frost was 31 weeks pregnant with a daughter she’d already named Sephina when, on November 27, she started feeling uncomfortable.
According to the Daily Mail, Frost went into St. Thomas’ Hospital near her home in London, England, where she saw Dr. Andrew Shennan for a check up. Not long into their appointment, Dr. Shennan realized that Frost’s uterus wasn’t supplying blood to her placenta, keeping the baby from getting enough oxygen. Sephina’s heartbeat was dangerously low. Dr. Shennan immediately sent Frost for an emergency C-section.
“We knocked her out with a general anesthetic and from my first incision to delivery, it was just 30 seconds, the fastest emergency C-section I have ever done,” Dr. Shennan tells the Daily Mail. “If Masina hadn’t been with me at that moment, we would have lost Sephina.”
The cause of the lack of blood supply, Dr. Shennan discovered was that Frost’s uterus had ruptured, and Sephina had been born into her mother’s abdominal cavity. Uterine rupture is very rare, and typically happens to women who have had previous C-sections or other uterine surgeries that leave their uterus with a scar that can stretch and tear open during a subsequent pregnancy. Still, “the risk of uterine rupture during labor after cesarean is low — between 0.5 percent and 0.9 percent,” says Dr. Alyssa Dweck, an OB-GYN and author of The Complete A to Z for Your V. But most obstetricians do see the condition at least once in their career.
“If the rupture is large enough,” Dr. Dweck explains, “the baby can exit the uterus and ends up floating around in the abdomen, cutting off the blood supply to the placenta,” as was the case for Masina Frost. This can be life-threatening for both mom and baby, since ruptures can lead to hemorrhaging, loss of the uterus, and shock.
