Ben Rosenberger thought he was about to follow his newborn son to the NICU. Instead, after an emergency C-section, the healthy baby was placed in his arms while his wife, Casey Gould, went into cardiac arrest.
As the couple told People, Casey was diagnosed with peripartum cardiomyopathy, a form of heart failure that can strike around childbirth, and was placed in a medically induced coma while doctors worked to save her life. It was unclear whether she would survive. Ben, 35, found himself holding their son, Archer, alone while the woman who had fought through infertility and pregnancy losses to get there lay unconscious in intensive care.
At some point during that stretch, he had what he describes as a moment of clarity. “I realized all these special moments she had fantasized over were stolen from her,” he said.
He couldn’t fix her heart or wake her up. What he could control was who held their son, and he decided the first person to hold Archer would be Casey—whenever she woke, if she woke.
So he asked that no one else hold Archer while she was unconscious—not family, not friends—so that when Casey woke, that milestone would still belong to her. He advocated for skin-to-skin contact between his comatose wife and their son, creating moments she could later see in photographs. He wrapped Archer in one of Casey’s sweatshirts for photos. As best he could, he built a record of a motherhood she had been present for but couldn’t remember.
Two days later, Casey woke up. Her first thought, waking alone in an ICU surrounded by machines, was that Archer hadn’t survived. Within moments, Ben placed their son in her arms.
Casey says learning what her husband had done while she was unconscious changed how she sees their marriage. “At my most vulnerable, he protected me,” she said.
