A south Alabama family is in mourning after a 32-year-old mother who was pregnant with her second child died of COVID-19 on Friday.
Haley Mulkey Richardson, 32, was a registered nurse working in a labor and delivery unit at Ascension Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola and living in Theodore, Ala., according to friends and family in the Mobile area.
Richardson’s mother, Julie Mulkey, said she is doing as well as could be expected after losing both a daughter and an unborn grandchild.
“It’s really hard,” Mulkey said. “It’s hard to accept, it’s hard to face. We’re glad she’s not suffering anymore.”
Richardson lived just outside Mobile in Theodore with her husband Jordan Richardson and their daughter Katie, who turns 3 this week.
Jason Whatley, a family friend whose wife was the maid of honor at Richardson’s wedding, told AL.com that Haley contracted COVID-19 about three weeks before her death, in late July or early August.
“She was home sick for about a week and then her heart rate went up,” Whatley said. “I guess that’s something they look for.”
Haley and Jordan Richardson with daughter Katie.Richardson family
From there, Richardson was taken to the USA Health Children’s and Women’s Hospital in Mobile. After being there for a few days, she was transported to the ICU at USA Health’s main hospital campus in Mobile.
“After about three or four days in the hospital, the [obstetrician] told her that she was going to lose the baby,” Whatley said. “And she continued to get worse and worse.”
“At some point, they basically told her that we’ve got to start treating you as if you didn’t have a child. We’ve got to do what we can for you because the baby is going to pass anyway.”
Mulkey said her daughter could not have visitors once she was transferred to USA.
“Haley did call me crying, that she was going to lose the baby,” she said. “And she was down there by herself when that happened.”
Richardson was able to make a final public Facebook post on Aug. 9.
“Here in the dark, in the wee hours of the morning, it is so easy to pretend that all of this was just a nightmare or that I’m just here in this hospital bed due to my own issues with Covid,” Richardson wrote. “Not for anything being wrong with my sweet baby girl whom I thought I was protecting in my own womb.
“I know the prognosis and I know the reality. And while part of me may start to acknowledge this, the other part of me still believes God is still the God of miracles and is in control above all else. I hope and pray for miracles, but having said that I am also praying for his will to be done. If there has ever been a time to ask for something to be taken out of my own hands and put in his, it is now.”
Mulkey said her daughter’s faith was characteristic of how she lived her life.
“Haley was a Christian,” Mulkey said. “She fully believed in her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. She lived it every day. You could see it in her smile in her face. She was a labor and delivery nurse, and she greeted her patients with caring and concern and love and often witnessed to them and prayed with them.”
Whatley said Richardson was the rock of her family.
“She was the kindest person I’ve ever met in my life,” he said. “Every family has that person that just kind of makes it go. And even today, it’s like, ‘if Haley was here, she would know what to do.’”
After being told she would lose the baby, Richardson continued to deteriorate in the hospital, until she was finally put on a ventilator about four days before her death.
Whatley said at one point Richardson was on a waiting list to be transferred to UAB for ECMO treatment — a machine that acts as an artificial heart and lungs, pumping blood out of a patient to oxygenate it and then pumping it back in.
“Unfortunately, within about a 24-hour period, she got worse to where she was no longer stable enough for them to transport her,” he said.
The unborn child, Ryleigh Beth, died on Aug. 18. Haley followed on Friday, Aug. 20.
“The doctor called us I guess around 1:30 Friday morning and said that things were looking very grim and asked me where we were and how long it would take us to get there,” Mulkey said.
Mulkey said she, Jordan, and Jordan’s mother Donna Richardson were able to say goodbye.
Whatley said Richardson was healthy before catching COVID, with no preexisting or chronic conditions, apart from being about six months pregnant.
“She was a nurse,” Whatley said. “She knew exactly when to go to the hospital, when her heart rate went up.
“They wished she’d been vaccinated, but outside of that, when she got sick, they did all the right things. And she still died.”
Haley and Jordan RichardsonRichardson family
Mulkey said she and her daughter had many conversations about the vaccine, and that Richardson chose not to get the vaccine because she was planning to have another child and she was concerned about the potential for anaphylactic reactions.
“Haley had had anaphylaxis reactions in the past,” Mulkey said. “So for that reason, she felt that it was not safe for her.
“And then, of course, with all the negative reporting that has gone on, what was she to believe about what the vaccine would do to reproduction?
“Stuff about that it would destroy a female’s eggs and that kind of thing, and she wanted to have her second baby. That made her afraid to get it.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends pregnant women get the vaccine if they have not already done so. The CDC says vaccine data continues to show the vaccine is safe for women in all stages of pregnancy, women who are thinking of becoming pregnant and women who are breastfeeding.
Dr. Karen Leigh Samples, Obstetrics and Gynecology Department Chair at Huntsville Hospital for Women & Children, told AL.com there is no evidence that the vaccine will impact a woman’s fertility.
“Claims linking COVID-19 vaccines to infertility are unfounded and have no scientific evidence supporting them,” Samples said. “The ACOG (American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology) recommends vaccination for all eligible people who may consider future pregnancy.”
Mulkey said that the hospital where Richardson worked was requiring all employees to be vaccinated by November, but she wanted to wait until after she delivered her baby.
“We talked about it several times,” Mulkey said. “She said at one point that she had about made up her mind to do it. And she just… she just couldn’t quite get it done.
“If she had had the information that has come out since this happened to her, yes, she would have gotten it.”
Mulkey said she and her other daughter have both decided to get the vaccine since Richardson’s illness. Now she is especially reaching out to pregnant women to urge them to get the shot.
“Since her illness, we have found that this is hitting many, many pregnant women that are 26-27 weeks into their pregnancies,” she said. “And the baby died two days before she would have been 27 weeks. So I understand there’s quite a few women in UAB in the same shape.”
Doctors at UAB Hospital in Birmingham reported last week that there were 10 pregnant women in their ICU with COVID-19, seven on ventilators.
When asked whether the Delta variant was responsible for the surge in pregnant women being admitted to the hospital, UAB’s Dr. Akila Subramaniam said “simply yes.”
South Alabama has been especially hard hit by the Delta variant, with Mobile and Baldwin Counties seeing some of the state’s largest numbers of cases in early August, around the time Richardson got sick. Several hospital ICUs in south Alabama are now over capacity, though there has been a slight drop in recent days. The state as a whole is approaching record numbers of COVID hospitalizations.
Rendi Murphree, an epidemiologist with the Mobile County Health Department, said during an update Friday that Mobile County had seen 960 deaths from COVID-19 and nearly 60,000 total cases since the pandemic began.
But vaccination rates are also beginning to increase, as the variant rages through the country.
“I had held off on getting my own shot,” Mulkey said. “Now I have done that, the second one’s coming up later this week. My older daughter is the same way.
“And we have a couple across the street from us who are expecting, and one afternoon I just barreled over there, and I said ‘look, if you haven’t done it, go get it done.’
“It’s absolutely had a big bearing on our opinion. Watching what my precious daughter went through was indescribably hard,” she said.
This content was originally published here.