Texas Woman Survives COVID-19, Heart Attack & 3 Strokes Before Having Baby

A Texas woman — now mother of three — has done the unthinkable.

Diana Crouch of Kingwood, Texas, is expected to make a full recovery after being hospitalized for 139 days battling COVID-19 while pregnant. According to ABC7, she found out she was infected with COVID-19 in August 2021. Not only did she test positive for the coronavirus, but she was told by doctors she had COVID pneumonia. She was then sedated and put on a ventilator days later, when she was 18 weeks pregnant.

Crouch, 28, told ABC7 she has little recollection of her time in the hospital. "It's scary. You don't know you are out that long. I was in the hospital for almost five months. It felt like a year to me," she said.

When Crouch was 25 weeks pregnant, she suffered from three strokes on the same day and a heart attack. She was also having seizures.

Dr. Cameron Dezfulian, medical director of adult congenital heart impatient care at Texas Children's Hospital, told ABC7, "The next morning, I remember coming in and (Diana's husband Chris) said, 'I know this is going to be OK, God has told me this is going to be OK.' He said, 'We are going to have a heck of a story to tell when this is done.' He was right. It is a heck of a story to tell. I think him saying that and just how sure he was about it made me sure, because really, as the physician, I didn't have any kind of confidence. I knew what was up ahead of us. I knew all the things that could go wrong."

Diana's husband Chris tearfully said, "Dr. Dezfulian, we sat down together and we prayed, because I told him I didn't come here to plan a funeral. He prayed with me and said, 'This is all we can do now,' and we were lucky enough and blessed to actually get better from there. It meant a lot for the doctor to share a prayer with you. It means so much. It crossed my mind way too many times that I was going to be raising these kids by myself."

Crouch's original due date was January 19. She had an emergency C-section at 31 weeks pregnant when her lung collapsed. She was finally introduced to her new son three days after he was born when her health began to improve. She was taken off the ventilator 10 days later. She was released from the hospital on December 23, according to ABC7. She's expected to make a full recovery, but is still going to physical and occupational therapy and is still on oxygen on an as-needed basis.

Crouch and her husband named their new son Cameron, after Dr. Dezfulian.

"It's never happened before," Dezfulian told ABC7 about having a child named after him. "When they told me, I was in tears. It's such an honor. I told them I said I don't deserve this. I consider this one of a handful of miracles. (Chris) told me that and he said, 'We are just really grateful and believed that we would get through all of this.'"