35 gallons of blood save 'Miracle Mom'

"Come about the sixth hour, after I watched cooler after cooler after cooler with my wife's name on it, full of blood, going up and down the hallways, I started getting worried."

And with good reason. Dustin Walker's wife, Gina, was hemorrhaging blood hours after delivering the couple's fifth child and physicians were racing to save her life.

Walker had a complicated pregnancy, suffering from a rare condition called placenta percreta, which one of her doctors described as "where the placenta can invade through the uterine wall and go into the bladder." So she and her doctors were prepared for a possibly difficult delivery, but nothing like what she actually experienced.

"The whole pregnancy was horrific," Gina Walker said. "Every week was a new symptom, a new hemorrhage, a new blood clot, a new this, a new that. The baby was going to have issues."

The Walkers' daughter was successfully delivered by Caesarian section at San Antonio's University Hospital, but Gina's condition worsened significantly while doctors were performing a medically-necessary hysterectomy afterwards. She began bleeding uncontrollably, suffering a "catastrophic hemorrhage," in the words of Dr. Jason Parker.

Several trauma surgeons were called in to help, along with the hospital's chief of gynecological oncology, who was quoted on the Houston Chronicle as saying that "For a brief period we were able to get the hemorrhage under control enough to complete the operation we intended to do. And then just as we were close to the completion of that operation, she started to bleed massively again."

Ultimately, Gina Walker would require 35 gallons of blood from the hospital's blood bank. At any given time, typical adults have about 1.3 gallons of blood in their system.

At a press conference this week, the woman who oversees the blood supply said they had called in all available units of Type B blood in the city. An extraordinary measure, but Sherrie Warner said, "We never stopped. We knew it was an OB patient, and there was a baby involved."

"Up until Gina's surgery, we have not ever transfused that much blood to a patient."

All the effort paid off. Walker and her daughter both survived. Mom had to spend a month in the hospital to recover, but is doing well and not suffering any major complications -- something for which Gina and her husband are very grateful, since its not uncommon for patients like Gina to suffer stroke or paralysis after losing such astonishing amounts of blood.

At a press conference -- and alongside her husband who was clutching their newborn child -- she said, "I know that a true miracle has happened."