A pregnant 23-year-old, Shelly Cawley from Concord in North Carolina was in her last semester of nursing school in September 2014 when she went into labor. The Mom-to-be was so excited to hold her little one in her arms when she went into labor, but fate had different things in mind.

Shelly fell into a coma when she suffered a pulmonary embolism. It happened when a blood clot in her leg went to her lungs and clogged her important arteries. Doctors managed to stabilize her condition as she was already in an incubated sleep during the surgery, but she failed to recover even a few hours after C-section.

The nurses then stepped in to help and brought her baby Rylan to her room. They rested the newborn on her chest for a skin-to-skin.

Little baby Rylan let out a cry and Shelly stirred and around one month later, Shelly was able to go home healthy.

Shelly has finished her nursing school and has now started working at the same hospital where her new colleagues are her lifesavers.

“It’s pretty awesome” Shelly said. “I cross paths with some of the people who saved me all the time.”

Her husband Jeremy Cawley recalls the trying time, “The doctors had done everything they could. At this time, they were absolutely sure that they would lose Shelly. You are so unbelievably excited that your child is born … and in the next moment, you believe you’ll have to say farewell to your wife forever. It was like being numb.”

As a nurse, Shelly now says that every time patients arrive at the hospital’s emergency department in critical, she is struck by how close she was to death herself.

“It hits me a lot. I see patients come in the emergency department, some of them critical and on the edge of life and death and I know that was me,” she said.

“There will be times when I look at her and I feel extra emotional and I’ll just say, ‘Mommy loves you. You saved Mommy’s life,’’ Shelly added.

In an interview shortly following the day Rylan was born, the Cawleys spoke about the moments after their daughter was delivered.

“Somewhere in those next moments the little bit of fluid in her lungs became a lot and all the doctors I talked to said if she wasn’t already incubated and already put to sleep she would have died,’ Jeremy said.

“Really what we did was, we got Rylan to cry as much as she could, and we prayed together. And you could see the doctors and nurses taking their time to pray as well.”

“And she reacted to Rylan being there. And that reaction helped her fight enough until they could get the other doctors involved from CMC Main.”

Shelly said that her fight for recovery was forced by her daughter. “I’ve been told the story – by putting her on my chest and making her cry was what brought me back,” she said.