CELINA, Ohio (AP) — A Celina woman diagnosed with COVID-19 does not know she gave birth to a baby boy last week. On Tuesday night, Megan Sites remained sedated and on a ventilator.

As the coronavirus spread, Shaun Jeffries and his wife Kacie worried about their parents and grandparents, not people their own age. Shaun’s sister Megan was healthy, a non-smoker, and a nurse.

She was also pregnant. Her baby is doing well, but she’s still fighting for her life.

Kacie says, “She doesn’t know that she had her baby, and her baby was delivered at 29 weeks.”

Megan’s symptoms started slow: a cold and a fever, aches and pains, and what felt like a sinus infection or cold. Since she was seven months pregnant, she was tested for the coronavirus.

Shaun Jeffries says in just “24 hours’ time, the way it progressed, it was mean. That’s the only way to put it: it was a mean virus.”

Megan worked as a nurse. Shaun says she knew what she was up against as she went to the hospital. “She was crying to my mom, saying she doesn’t want to die. That right there tells you she knew enough and what she was going through.”

But her condition quickly worsened in the hospital. Kacie says, “Her lungs were just failing. In order to save her and her baby, they had to do an emergency C-section.”

Megan was sedated, then put on what’s called an ECMO machine. The extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine does the work of the heart and lungs, oxygenating the blood by pumping it out of the body, through an artificial lung, then back in. Shaun says, “By then they’re saying that’s the last thing. That’s the last thing we can try and do.”

Megan improved slightly. She’s now on a ventilator. The baby was tested twice for coronavirus and was negative each time. He’s now in the NICU. Megan’s husband Donny finally held the baby three days after it was born, but the family can’t see her in the hospital, or visit each other to cope together.

Kacie says, “Never in a million years would we have thought our 27-year-old sister would be infected with this virus and almost lose her life. People have got to take this seriously.”

Megan and Donny’s son still hasn’t been given a name as they wait and hope for Megan’s recovery. Shaun says Megan’s daughter asks for mommy a lot right now, but is having fun with her daddy.

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