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Ruby Graupera-Cassimiro gave birth to a daughter, Taily, on September 23rd. But following the planned C-section, she was nearly pronounced dead at Boca Raton Regional Hospital by doctors after suffering a rare amniotic fluid embolism. "I was dead," Graupera-Cassimiro, 40, said in an interview with ABC News. "My husband tells me, 'You were gray. You were cold as ice, and you were dead. You had no color in your lips.'" "I remember seeing a spiritual being who I believe was my dad," Graupera-Cassimiro said of her going 45 minutes without a heartbeat. "I remember the light behind him and many other spiritual beings. I wasn't walking, I was kind of flowing," she told ABC. "It's peaceful. There's nothing to be afraid of."
"At one point, there was like a force almost, and it was like, you're not going any further. This is it. And that's when I understood you're not going to stay here. This is just a little bit. You're going to go back. It's not your time." "I really didn’t know I died, by the way. I had no clue," Graupera-Cassimiro said. "That’s why when I woke up, to me no time had passed. I was like, why do I have this in my mouth?” "I realize through all of this that one, we really don't really have control of our lives," she said. "The day you go is the day that you were destined to go."
Bocal Raton, FL resident Ruby Graupera-Cassimiro with her son and newborn daughter after surviving without a heartbeat for 45 minutes.
Hospital spokesman Thomas Chakurda told the Associated Press that “the woman's survival is a story of two miracles - her resuscitation and the fact that she survived without serious brain damage.” "She essentially spontaneously resuscitated when we were about to call the time of death," he said. Doctors had no immediate explanation for her survival, Chakurda added, calling her case one of "divine providence." "There's very few things in medicine that I've seen, working in the trauma center myself and doing all the things that I do, that really were either unexplainable or miraculous," Dr. Anthony Dardano, president of the hospital's medical staff, told Florida’s Sun Sentinel. "And when I heard this story, that was the first thing that came to my mind."
The Sun Sentinel reports that “amazingly, doctors say, Graupera-Cassimiro suffered no complications. No reduced brain function from the loss of circulation. No burns from the repeated shocks doctors delivered in hopes of restarting her heart.” She reportedly did not even have bruises from the chest compressions that medical professionals gave her to keep her blood flowing. Some theorize that Graupero-Cassimira's survival was due to the extended length of time doctors attempted to revive her. "A lot of doctors will stop compressions after about 20 minutes," Dr. Sam Parnia, who runs the resuscitation research program at New York's Stony Brook University Medical School, told CBS News. "But we know from research that if you go on for 40 minutes to an hour, your chances of bringing someone back to life is much, much higher." "I don't know why I was given this opportunity," Graupera-Cassimiro said, "but I'm very grateful for it."
According to the Sun Sentinel, doctors have begun calling Graupero-Cassimira's story “the ‘Second Miracle on Meadows Road,’ because hospital employees already refer to a prior event as the first: The building of the hospital itself.” The hospital came to Boca Raton because “a grass roots effort born out of the tragic deaths of two children raised a million dollars to bring a hospital to the city, then home to just 10,000 people.”
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