Jessica's Life Memorial

At just 29 years young, this precious and loving soul was taken too soon. Jess had a full life ahead of her and was very excited to experience motherhood for the first time. Having set up Izzy's nursery room, organizing all her future outfits, and picking out the perfect stroller and car seat, Jess made sure we were ready for our beautiful little girl to come home.

Unfortunately, on January 23rd she experienced complications during birth due to an undiagnosed hole in her heart. After birthing our beautiful little girl, the doctors took many hours to stop the bleeding and moved her to the ICU. In the ICU, Jess's body could not produce enough blood oxygen and the doctors were forced to put her under anesthesia and intubated her onto a ventilator. While under the ventilator, her body was still unable to produce the necessary amount of blood oxygen. Jess was then transferred to the Cardiothoracic ICU at the UC Davis Medical Hospital where she was put on another ventilator and a machine called ECMO, which is a machine that provides the blood in the body oxygen in place of the heart. During her stay at UCDH, they performed CT scans and an echo scan on her heart where they found a hole connecting two heart chambers and that Jess had suffered a stroke while under. The stroke had caused a blood clot in her brain that affected her peripheral vision and memory slightly. They also concluded that the hole in her heart was there all of Jess's life and never closed after infancy causing her to have Pulmonary Artery Hypertension. The pushing during delivery caused the hole to expand and allowed blood to flow the wrong way in her heart and also limited the amount of blood reaching the right lung.

Jess made improvements throughout the week, they took her off the ECMO machine and her body showed signs of keeping her blood oxygen levels high. Soon they took her off the ventilator, extubated her, and moved her to a regular ICU, where she was barely able to talk due to being intubated for multiple days. During this time and our visits, she was barely able to talk to us and would be forgetful at times but would still ask how Izzy is doing and if we are watching her.

The morning of January 31st, 2023, her oxygen levels started to drop, and the doctors were forced to put her back on the ventilator and ECMO machine. During this procedure, her vitals dropped and the doctors tried for almost 3 hours to bring her back.

Jess was an amazing daughter....sister....friend....cousin.....aunt and an even better wife. She would have been the perfect mother for our little Isabella. Something she was looking forward to once she found out she was pregnant. We are devastated and torn, this world is now a darker place without her brightness to light it up. We are asking for help in celebrating this once-in-a-lifetime soul reaching the heavens. Anything helps, thank you.