"It's faith really. It's the ability to think that miracles can happen, but at the same time we're realistic," Daniel shared.
Daniel White and his wife Pia Reyes discovered they were pregnant in February 2022. It was a dream come true for them, but all their happiness came to a tragic end when Pia suffered a brain hemorrhage during Memorial Day weekend that caused her to go into a coma. According to PEOPLE, she was 22 weeks pregnant at the time.
Now, all Daniel wants is for his wife to wake up so they can welcome their baby son together soon.
"There's so many things we're fighting for and hoping for," Daniel, a 42-year-old analyst who works for Virginia's Fairfax County in planning and development, said. "It means the world to us."
The couple met on Match.com about eight years ago and soon discovered their mutual love for golfing, going to concerts, cooking together, and trying new restaurants out. They decided to take the plunge in 2019 and officially became man and wife.
"She's the most compassionate person you could ever meet. She never thinks about herself," Daniel said of his wife Pia, 42, who works as an analyst for the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank.
"If we don't have hope, we don't have anything," says Daniel White, whose Filipino-American wife, Pia Reyes, suffered a brain hemorrhage when she was 20 weeks pregnant. https://t.co/h3fk06Zw9G
— Yahoo Philippines (@YahooPH) June 20, 2022
"She always thinks about other people," he added. "She's just sweet. She literally would do anything for somebody she would meet. Whatever it would take, she would bend over backwards for them just to make them happy."
Initially, when they planned on expanding their family, they were told they would have to undergo IVF but learned in late February that Pia had become pregnant without any fertility treatments. "It just happened," Daniel shared.
The excited parents chose Noah as their little one's name, due October 17, and even got a new home for their growing family.
Ahead of Memorial Day, the couple traveled to the North Carolina Outer Banks to visit Daniel's family on Hatteras Island for a week. That's when Pia complained of a headache. She took an over-the-counter pain reliever, which helped her at first, but the pain just didn't go away, Daniel said.
On Sunday, May 22, the couple had a quiet day and Pia retired to bed early, around 9:00 pm. However, about 20 or 30 minutes later, Pia called Daniel and told him she wasn't feeling well. "She was sweating and running a little bit of a fever," Daniel said. After throwing up, "She seemed to be fine," he remembers. "Then she threw up a little bit more."
He told her he would sit with her until she fell asleep, but, "all of a sudden, her breathing changed," he recalled, noting that it seemed erratic. "I tried to wake her up and she wasn't responsive."
He called 911. "They were only two or three streets over," he said. "They were there pretty much immediately." A neighbor who is an EMT came over too, and they tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Initially, Daniel was worried it was a shellfish reaction, but the EMT said it wasn't. "We just didn't really know what was going on," Daniel shared.
She was taken to The Outer Banks Hospital in Nags Head and a CAT scan was done. "They could see the blood in the brain," Daniel said. She was then transferred to ECU Health, a teaching hospital in Greenville, North Carolina.
"They knew at that point she basically had a brain hemorrhage and had inserted a drain into her brain," he said. "She had traumatic injuries to her brain." Doctors explained to the worried husband that there was a blood clot putting pressure on her brain stem that caused the coma.
"Because she was so young, they wanted to give her a chance," Daniel said. "A chance to survive." Though she is stable now, they can't operate on her because of where the clot is located, and for her to have a safe delivery, the baby must at least be 23 or 24 weeks old. "They want to do everything they can for her," Daniel said, of Pia. "But we don't know how she'll come out of everything."
She has also been given a pretty poor prognosis, shared Daniel. "If she makes it, her quality of life could be pretty poor, but we don't really know since it is a brain injury and they've done some angiograms, but they can't really pinpoint any abnormalities, anything that really caused it."
He then shared that his son is healthy, adding that this is what probably keeps his wife going. "That might be the spirit of Pia that goes on," he added. "So it means the world to me."
He is also hanging onto the hope that his son will survive. "It's faith really. It's the ability to think that miracles can happen, but at the same time we're realistic," Daniel shared. "If we don't have hope, we don't have anything."
For more information or to contribute to Pia's medical treatment, you can visit the family's GoFundMe page.
References:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/donate-to-help-pia-and-daniel-white?
Cover Image Credit: GoFundMe
