With Pregnant Wife in Coma, Virginia Man Fights to Save Her and Their Baby-to-Be: 'Miracles Can Happen'
courtesy Daniel White Daniel White and Pia Reyes
When Daniel White and wife Pia Reyes discovered they were pregnant in February, they felt like they were living a miracle. But Memorial Day weekend, Pia suffered a brain hemorrhage that has landed her in a coma at 22 weeks pregnant. Now Daniel is praying for another miracle — and fighting to save her and their son on the way.
"There's so many things we're fighting for and hoping for," Daniel, a 42-year-old analyst who works for Virginia's Fairfax County in planning and development, tells PEOPLE. "It means the world to us."
The couple — who share a love of golfing, going to concerts, cooking together and trying new restaurants — connected on Match.com about eight years ago before tying the knot on Aug. 8, 2019.
"She's the most compassionate person you could ever meet. She never thinks about herself," Daniel says of Pia, 42, who works as an analyst for the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank.
"She always thinks about other people," he adds. "She's just sweet. She literally would do anything for somebody she would meet. Whatever it would take, she would bend over backwards for them just to make them happy."
courtesy Daniel White Pia Reyes
When the spouses began to explore the possibility of having children, doctors told them they would have to undergo in vitro fertilization (IVF). So they were thrilled when they learned in late February that Pia had become pregnant without any fertility treatments. "It just happened," Daniel says.
They decided to name their baby-boy-to-be, due Oct. 17, Noah, and in mid-April they bought a new house in Herndon for their growing family.
With everything on the up and up, the couple traveled to the North Carolina Outer Banks ahead of Memorial Day to visit Daniel's family on Hatteras Island for a week.
That Thursday, Pia had a little headache. She took an over-the-counter pain reliever, which initially seemed to help, but her pain was persistent, Daniel says.
On Sunday, May 22, the couple went to mass and had a leisurely day of pizza and watching golf on TV before Pia went to bed around 9 p.m., with Daniel kissing her goodnight and tucking her into bed, he remembers.
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However, about 20 or 30 minutes later, Pia called Daniel and told him she wasn't feeling well. "She was sweating and running a little bit of a fever," Daniel says. He got her a trashcan so she could throw up and then wiped her down with a washcloth to clean her and try to lower her temperature. "She seemed to be fine," he remembers. "Then she threw up a little bit more."
courtesy Daniel White Pia Reyes and Daniel White
Daniel promised to sit with her before she leaned on her side and fell asleep. "Then all of a sudden, her breathing changed," he recalls, noting that it seemed erratic. "I tried to wake her up and she wasn't responsive."
He called 911. "They were only two or three streets over," he says. "They were there pretty much immediately." A neighbor who is an EMT came over too, and they tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
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Daniel initially worried it was her mild shellfish allergy, but his EMT friend said that it wasn't an allergic reaction. "We just didn't really know what was going on," Daniel says.
courtesy Daniel White Pia Reyes
Pia was taken to The Outer Banks Hospital in Nags Head, where they performed a CAT scan and told Daniel his wife had a brain hemorrhage. "They could see the blood in the brain," Daniel says.
Doctors wanted to send her to the ICU in Norfolk or Chesapeake in Virginia, but there weren't any beds available. They ended up transferring her to ECU Health, a teaching hospital in Greenville, North Carolina. She arrived around 3 a.m., three hours before Daniel and his family arrived.
"They knew at that point she basically had a brain hemorrhage and had inserted a drain into her brain," he says. "She had traumatic injuries to her brain."
Daniel says he met with teams of doctors, who said they wanted to drain the fluid off Pia's brain. They explained that there was a blood clot putting pressure on her brain stem that caused the coma.
"Because she was so young, they wanted to give her a chance," Daniel tells PEOPLE. "A chance to survive."
courtesy Daniel White Daniel White and Pia Reyes
Now Daniel says "we're really in a holding pattern."
Although his wife is stable, they can't perform surgery because of where the blood clot is located, Daniel says. And in order to have a viable delivery, physicians told Daniel that the baby needs to make it to 23 or 24 weeks. Right now, they're waiting.
"They want to do everything they can for her," Daniel says of Pia. "But we don't know how she'll come out of everything."
The prognosis for his wife "is pretty poor," Daniel says. "If she makes it, her quality of life could be pretty poor, but we don't really know since it is a brain injury and they've done some angiograms, but they can't really pinpoint any abnormalities, anything that really caused it."
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As for their son on the way, Daniel says doctors are monitoring him and focused on saving him.
"We can hear his heartbeat," Daniel says. "That seems to be strong. So we're really hopeful, but there's so many unknowns."
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"That might be the spirit of Pia that goes on," he adds. "So it means the world to me."
As the heartbreaking circumstances test their patience, Daniel and the couple's family and friends have a daily prayer on Zoom every night. "We're kind of like, 'Where is the miracle at?'" Daniel says. "It's definitely a tough time."
In the meantime, he hangs onto hope that his son will survive. "It's faith really. It's the ability to think that miracles can happen, but at the same time we're realistic," Daniel says. "If we don't have hope, we don't have anything."
And he's thankful for the ways others have tried to help. "It means a lot," he says. "My wife's originally from the Philippines. We've had people fly in from all over the world to see her. The outpouring of support has been enormous and it means so much and it makes it so much easier."
For more information or to contribute to Pia's medical treatment, visit the family's GoFundMe.
