BY KRISTEN HAMPTON, WBTV

On the morning of July 2, Chris Severt heard a noise he knew wasn’t right. “I got up that morning, took the dog out, came back in, sat down in the chair and heard a weird noise coming from upstairs,” Severt said. He went into the bedroom to find his wife, who was 18 weeks pregnant, with her arms clinched into her chest and unresponsive.

Severt said he could tell she wasn’t breathing. He immediately started CPR, and within minutes, first responders made their way to their Alexander County home in Hiddenite. They used a defibrillator to bring back enough of a pulse to get Mindy Severt to the hospital.

She stayed at CMC’s Sanger Heart Clinic in Charlotte for weeks while doctors tried to figure out what had happened to the seemingly healthy 29-year-old. “They found out I had long QT syndrome, which is where the heart has pauses but they’re longer than the normal pauses would be,” Mindy Severt said.

She was put into a hypothermic state, where her body temperature was reduced to 92 degrees. She went through two major heart surgeries. “...if she didn’t make it, he wasn’t going to make it,” Chris Severt said of his wife and unborn baby.
Mindy Severt was released from the hospital with a pacemaker, and all doctors could tell her was that her unborn baby had a heartbeat. In the months that followed, more tests showed the baby was growing normally, despite the barrage of procedures on his mother.

But still, the Severts waited and hoped the procedures that kept her alive didn’t harm their child. On Dec. 1, a healthy baby Sawyer Severt was born to a healthy mother. “It was honestly the greatest feeling you could ever imagine,” Chris Severt said.

The three are now home and preparing to spend their first Christmas as a family, with their newborn Christmas miracle.


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