EUREKA, Mo. (KMOV.com) — As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urge all pregnant women to get the vaccine, a couple from Eureka is sharing their story in the hopes of impacting others.
Jaclyn and Dean Sindel found out they were expecting last October, but their excitement shifted to concern when they thought about how the pregnancy would go in the midst of a pandemic. Dean is an ICU nurse at Mercy Hospital, and Jaclyn works in social media for Mercy. With the risk of Dean bringing the virus home, Jaclyn said they did everything they could to keep the virus at bay.
“We had the threat of COVID actually coming into our home regularly,” she said. “We took a lot of measures in our home to keep things clean, limiting what we’re doing.”
Aside from masking, sanitizing and social distancing, she and her husband knew they wanted the vaccine, and Jaclyn said getting her dose last winter while she was 20 weeks pregnant was a no-brainer.
“They were saying it could pass along antibodies to the baby,” Sindel said. “I was breastfeeding and knew that would be a great thing for [our daughter] and myself.”
Dr. Laura Vricella, a maternal fetal medicine physician at Mercy, said a growing number of unvaccinated pregnant women are winding up in the hospital, critically ill from COVID-19. Her team believes it’s likely due to the Delta variant, which known to make people sicker and is vastly more transmissible.
“The COVID illness that we’re seeing right now in our pregnant patients is much more severe than the illness we saw a year ago and it has us really worried,” Vricella said.
Vricella said the virus has forced many pregnant women to deliver their babies prematurely, making the early months for the child and mother much harder.
“That really makes the beginning of life much more difficult for their babies and it’s also incredibly stressful for the women because they can’t be near their babies because they’re too sick,” Vricella said.
Doctors said even mild COVID cases in pregnant women can be detrimental to their children, causing other complications including stillbirths.
“Several of them have come back with still births, this is even more worrisome because it’s a sign that even if it doesn’t make the woman critically ill it can still affect the placenta and cause her to lose her baby which is just devastating.”
Vricella said there is a likelihood antibodies will get passed on to the baby if a woman gets vaccinated while she is pregnant. She said this gives the baby some protection for at least the first few months of life.
