'Touch of God': UK doctor wakes up from COVID-19 coma to find she's given birth to twins

A hospital consultant in the UK who was in a coma with COVID-19 woke up to find that she’d given birth to twins. Dr Perpetual Uke was placed on a ventilator in a medically induced coma in April when her condition deteriorated. When Uke woke up from the coma and couldn’t see her bump, she feared she’d lost the babies.

Doctors decided to deliver the babies by caesarean section in case their mother did not recover. Her due date had been mid-July, but the babies were delivered at just 26 weeks.

“I couldn’t see my bump and I thought my babies were gone,” she told Metro. “It’s just a miracle what happened, to come out of this.

“We are all doing very well. I remember getting ill and the ambulance coming to take me away, and then I was put in a coma.

“Coming out of the coma was the worst aspect. I had nightmares. I was delusional, I couldn’t see my bump and I thought my babies were gone and all my family had died.

“It was a very, very worrying time for my husband and kids and, even after I woke up, I couldn’t see my babies for more than two weeks.”

The babies, a girl named Sochika Palmer, and a boy called Osinachi Pascal, weighed only 765g (27oz) and 850g (30oz) at birth. They were taken to a neonatal intensive care unit at Birmingham Women’s hospital while Uke recovered.

Uke’s worried husband, Matthew, had their prayers answered 16 days later when she came out of her coma and began her road to recovery, she told Metro.

The Birmingham City Hospital doctor has since been reunited with the babies, her husband, and her two other children – Nnamdi Ronald, 12, and Chisimdi Claire, 11.

“Coming home was the real healing point for me,” she said. “The family are now all together, and we’re all very, very happy.”