After childbirth, woman struggles with mounting complications

For more than six months, Laura Adams has been fighting.

Though she spends most of her days lying in bed, every day is a fight. Her body is fighting to heal from a series of medical disasters. Her spirit is fighting to stay positive as she is unable to care for her baby daughter, walk her dogs or return to the job she loved as a music therapist.

She is fighting to regain her voice. Before a failing pancreas and a roller coaster of complications turned her life upside down, her coping mechanisms were music and singing. But her vocal cords suffered partial paralysis from the intubation tube that kept her breathing during the early days of her long hospital stay — days when, for a time, she could only trace letters on her husband's palm to communicate.

In short, at 26 years old, Laura Adams is fighting to hold on to her life.

Her journey started more than a year ago, when she found out she was pregnant. Everything seemed to be going fine until about two weeks before her due date. On Dec. 6, 2015, she started having abdominal pain.

She had been having issues with gallstones, which pregnant women are more likely to get, so when she called her obstetrician-gynecologist, he said to take some Percocet and not worry.

Laura said she wants to tell her story in part because she wants people — women and their medical providers — to know to listen to their bodies.

'If you have a gut feeling something is wrong, it probably is. I just knew something was wrong,' she said later.

She took her doctor's advice, but the pain didn't subside. Only later would she learn that gallstones sometimes can fall into the common bile duct and cause a blockage of fluids, leading to pancreatic damage.

On Dec. 9, with severe pain in her back and abdomen, she woke her husband at 6:30 a.m. and told him they had to go to the hospital.

Soon they were in the emergency room at Central Iowa Healthcare in Marshalltown, where the staff realized Laura was right — something was wrong. Doctors performed an emergency C-section, and at 8:07 a.m. Josephine Teresa Adams was born.

Josie, at 6 pounds, 7 ounces, was healthy. But for Laura, that was the start of a monthslong ordeal of infections and surgeries, of recoveries and relapses.

In the hours after her daughter was born, Laura seemed to be doing OK. That night, however, her heart rate increased and a fever developed. She was moved from the maternity ward to the intensive care unit, then transferred to Mary Greeley Medical Center in Ames.

There, a CT scan revealed acute necrosis of the pancreas — her pancreas was dying. She was airlifted to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City.

According to the National Pancreas Foundation, acute pancreatitis is responsible for one in every 200 hospital admissions in the United States annually but only occurs in one of every 10,000 pregnancies. In the majority of cases, acute pancreatitis can be treated with simple therapies — but in 15 percent of cases, it becomes serious.

Doctors at UIHC later told her husband that Laura's was one of the most serious cases they had ever seen.

At first, the situation did not seem so dire. She spent three weeks in the hospital, battling infections and seeming to begin recovery before being transferred to Covenant Medical Center's Acute Inpatient Rehabilitation Center in Waterloo to work her way back to full health.

It was the first time she would be discharged from UIHC on a path to recovery, but it would not be the last. Less than a day later, her condition deteriorated so rapidly she had to be taken by helicopter back to Iowa City, where she immediately was prepped for surgery.

How to help: Laura Adams's GoFundMe account can be found here.

Doctors think her pancreas had ruptured, spilling infection into her lower colon, which in turn perforated, spreading the infection farther. Her abdomen was full of fecal matter, infected fluids and dead tissue.

She went into respiratory failure and was placed in a medically induced coma as machines kept her alive. Her legs had turned purple from lack of oxygen.

Her husband, Darin Adams, 30, was told she had a 50 percent chance of survival.

None of this was supposed to happen. An Army veteran who served in Iraq, he was the one used to fighting. Her job, as a music therapist at the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown, where they live, was to help others heal.

Darin was in the Army when they met — they had a mutual friend, and Darin sent her a message through the social media site MySpace during his second deployment in 2006.

She had gotten other messages on MySpace she hadn't responded to. But this one was different.

'He was respectful, so I actually messaged him back,' she said.

After getting to know each other through correspondence and phone calls, they met while he was on leave, and then married later when he was on emergency leave for his grandmother's funeral. She was 19, he was 23.

After college, the couple built their lives in Marshalltown — her as a music therapist, him working for the federal government. They adopted two cats and two dogs and fostered therapy dogs for Retrieving Freedom, which trains service dogs for veterans.

They wanted a family, but Darin had been diagnosed as infertile — he was told it still was possible to father a child, but that the chances of it happening were statistically irrelevant. They were taking classes to be foster parents when, against the odds, Laura got pregnant.

Talking about their situation 10 months later, Darin often fell back on the metaphors of battle.

'When this started, I told Laura to think of this as a long, shitty deployment,' he said.

He couldn't accept the odds the doctors were giving him.

'This is certainly a horrific story, but it's just chapter one,' he said with conviction in January, when he was spending every day at the hospital, sleeping in a chair next to Laura's bedside and falling asleep holding her hand. 'Chapter two is the recovery, and chapter three is my wife kicking ass again.'

Slowly, over the next few weeks, Laura's medical team got her stabilized. Multiple surgeries dealt with damage to her colon and holes in her small intestine and helped clear out infected tissue.

The repeated opening of her abdomen led to muscle damage, and doctors had to insert a surgical mesh to bind the muscles together. They performed a colostomy to try to allow her digestive track to heal and tried to figure out why she kept running a fever. They inserted drains into her abdomen to allow fluids and tissue, including chunks of her pancreas, to leave her body.

She still couldn't breathe on her own, so they performed a tracheotomy and discovered the vocal cord damage. Speaking through a valve on the hole in her throat, at first every word was painful to utter.

She could play the guitar a little, but it didn't provide the joy it used to.

'Playing guitar makes me kind of sad that I can't sing,' she said. 'We won't know for about a year if my vocal cords will totally recover.'

After she had been in the hospital for almost two months, Laura walked — three short steps. In February, she was able to start eating on her own, and the tracheotomy valve that helped her breathe was removed.

On the wall of her hospital room, stars made out of colorful paper marked each achievement: 'Sat up for three hours, Jan. 10.' 'Speaks, Jan. 22.' 'Pass swallow test, Feb. 3.'

An orange star marked dates of surgery: Dec. 9, Dec. 31, Jan. 3, Jan. 6, Jan. 8.' Above them all, a pink star: 'I survived!' Another: 'I fight.'

On March 1, her medical team decided she had recovered enough to transfer back to the rehab facility in Waterloo. It was closer to home, and she could focus on rebuilding strength, slowly pedaling a stationary bike and making her way down the hallway with a walker.

Darin was able to bring their pets to visit, one at a time, the first time she had seen them since December.

Her goals were to be able to stop using the walker and to be able to get down on the floor to play with Josie.

Darin was optimistic she would be able to return to work in June or July. Laura shook her head.

'I guess I know my body, and it just doesn't feel like it,' she said.

She was right. About a week later, she had to return to UIHC, lethargic and running another fever.

Laura's fight continues.

This is Part 1 of Laura's story. Part 2 will be published online and in print Sunday, June 19.

Read more: Marshalltown woman has some successes after pregnancy complications