Mum's bid to raise awareness of pregnancy-related heart condition

A mother who nearly died from a rare heart disease that affects pregnant women is campaigning to raise more awareness about it.

Paige Wilson from Coleshill in Warwickshire, was diagnosed with peripartum cardiomyopathy days after giving birth to her first child.

She said she wanted parents and health professionals to understand the dangers if not diagnosed quickly enough.

The disease can cause the heart to enlarge, and cause heart failure.

Mrs Wilson said she fell ill four days after a healthy pregnancy and routine birth at George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton three years ago.

"I started to feel really unwell," she said.

"I just felt like I couldn't get out of bed and there was something that wasn't quite right and I didn't necessarily know what was wrong."

She was rushed back to hospital where doctors initially diagnosed sepsis, but two days later it was confirmed she had peripartum cardiomyopathy.

Her condition declined rapidly, leading to her family being called to her bedside.

"They were basically having to call my mum and my husband to come and say goodbye because I'd got that ill," she said.

"I was on oxygen, I had a catheter in, I couldn't move, I couldn't breath and I did think I was going to die."

She went on to recover but missing out on the first few weeks of her son's life took its toll mentally, she said.

"I just couldn't cope and I genuinely felt like I didn't want to wake up every morning," she said.

"I felt like I didn't bond with [her son] because I felt like this awful mum because I'd missed practically his first couple of weeks."

Experts at the hospital where she gave birth said more needs to be done to spot the signs of peripartum cardiomyopathy early.

About one in 2,000 pregnant women will develop the condition either before or after giving birth, Dr Dawn Adamson, consultant cardiologist at University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire, said.

"We're doing a lot of work to train the future generations who are looking after the maternity services, the obstetricians, the cardiologists, the GPs, primary care, to try and be aware of all these different conditions that they're not going to see that frequently," she added.

The Maternal, Newborn and Infant Clinical Outcome Review released this month - found 229 women died within six weeks of giving birth between 2018 and 2020 - a 24% increase on the previous three years.

Of those deaths, 61 were related to heart disease - a quarter of which were from cardiomyopathy - and 90% of the women who died from heart disease had no pre-existing condition.

Mrs Wilson said she hoped raising awareness could save lives.

"I'm hoping this is just another way of getting people to think about it and want to learn more and hopefully save people's lives."

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