The doctors said I wasn’t going to make it — then prayer pulled me back

As told to Sara Bonchek

In January 2021, I was 37 weeks pregnant, and my husband, Yehuda, and I had just moved back to London from Yerushalayim with our four daughters. We were settling into our new apartment, anxiously waiting for our lift to arrive, when we came down with COVID-19.

Baruch Hashem, my husband and girls recovered quickly, but as the days went by, I felt worse and worse. My temperature crept up, and I was shaking, sweating, coughing, and in pain all over.

I was frightened for my unborn baby’s health, and early on Monday morning called the maternity ward at the local hospital, Barnet, for advice. They told me to come in urgently for a checkup. That set us off in a panic. My husband was in quarantine and couldn’t take me, and even if he could, who would look after our four daughters, who were also in quarantine and thus couldn’t be sent out to anyone?

We frantically called my brother Eli, who’s in Hatzalah, to see if he was available. Luckily, he wasn’t on shift and came immediately.

I was feeling so unwell, I remember clutching onto the reception desk at the hospital for support, thinking, The doctor’s taking too long to come, and then, Eli, catch me. I’m falling!

I don’t remember anything after that. Some of it is slowly coming back to me; the rest I’ve pieced together from the stories my husband and the hospital staff told me, and from the WhatsApp messages and voice notes my family and friends sent out.

Apparently, the nurses hooked me up to an IV right away, ran some blood tests, and checked my vitals. I was dehydrated, but the doctor declared that after a couple hours of rest and observation, I should be well enough to be discharged.

Several hours later, as I was getting ready to leave, a doctor came in and said, “I want to check you one more time before I let you go home.”

He hooked me up to a fetal monitor, and after a while declared briskly, “The baby’s heart rate isn’t great. You need to stay overnight.”

That decision saved our lives.

During the next morning’s monitoring session, both mine and my baby’s numbers were going haywire. I was rushed into surgery to deliver the baby, during which they found the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck twice, and a lot of meconium in the amniotic fluid, indicating he’d gone into distress. They’d delivered him in the nick of time.