Their guardian angel
If Gabrielle Barrow-Ross is certain of one thing, it’s that labor and delivery nurse Ava Zweifel saved her life and the lives of her sons Ari and Asa.
“I owe her everything. Everything.”
- Gabrielle Barrow-Ross
Gabrielle’s pregnancy seemed to be progressing normally, although she and her husband Nick had learned in October 2022 that they would be having twins. Not long after that revelation, when checking her blood pressure at home, she noticed it was quite elevated. She waited and checked again only to find it was still much too high. Her mother suggested she get to the hospital, and her ob-gyn urged her to do so as well.
In the emergency room at St. Luke’s Health – The Woodlands Hospital a nurse confirmed the high reading. “The doctor came in and she looked at me and she was like, are you okay?” Gabrielle recalls. While she felt fine, her dangerously high her blood pressure was a sign of severe pre-eclampsia. She was admitted but at just 29 weeks, Gabrielle was worried about her babies.
The care team told Gabrielle she would be hospitalized until the twins were born. The goal was to delay labor as long as possible without endangering Gabrielle’s life – ideally to the 34th week of her pregnancy.
Medication seemed to work, and Gabrielle settled into the hospital routine. But things changed the evening of Nov. 1. She had been moved to a different room that morning and told her husband it would be fine for him to run home. “I was like go home, I’m fine here. Relax and go home. Take care of our other son.”
Not long after, however, the team was in her room checking her vitals and the baby monitors. Her blood pressure was spiking, despite aggressive measures to lower it, and now there was an additional issue – one of the babies was experiencing a drop in his heart rate. That’s when nurse Ava Zweifel entered the room.
“When Ava came in she was like, no, this isn’t right,” Gabrielle says. “We need to go now.”
Ava recalls that moment.
“We were monitoring her overnight and one of the twins did a little something funky, but we got it all worked out,” she says. “Just as I'm about to get another report, one of her kiddo’s heartbeats went down low. Scary low. So we called the doctor immediately.”
The team readied Gabrielle for an emergency C-section.
“I told Gabrielle, I said, ‘Hey, there's no time for any other anesthesia except putting you all the way to sleep,’” Ava says.
Ava offered her patient soothing words of reassurance as they rushed her down the hall, dialing Nick’s number and holding the phone to Gabrielle’s ear so she could talk to her husband before she was put under. When she woke up, her mother was crying tears of relief and joy. Thankfully, all three had come through the delivery safely – although Ari and Asa, born prematurely, still had many medical issues to overcome before they were discharged.
Today, the boys are active, happy, and thriving, but Gabrielle still gets emotional when she recounts her story.
“It’s taken me a while to get to a point where I could tell it without actually tearing up.”
She believes everyone she encountered provided outstanding care at The Woodlands Hospital, but she sees Ava as her guardian angel. In a moment of chaos, where she wasn’t sure what would happen next, Ava’s strong and decisive presence reassured her. “I felt like she was a voice for me,” she says. “You know what I mean? Because I knew something was wrong.”
Ava recognizes that what seemed almost routine to her and the nursing team, was extraordinary for the Barrow-Ross family.
“I'm a very personal person,” she says. “When you’re my patient, you are a person to me. And I knew about her life at this point. I think it was a blessing to her to have somebody that she knew was going to take care of her.”