A new mum is urging pregnant women to get vaccinated after she was forced to give birth in an induced coma.

Chelsie King, 27, fell pregnant with her son Raphael in January this year, but later caught Covid in July.

She decided not to have her vaccination as she was unsure about its effect on pregnant women.

Chelsie, from Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, unfortunately started to feel unwell when she was around six months pregnant.

‘It was mainly sickness, and I had been suffering from that throughout my pregnancy,’ she said.

‘I had no loss of taste or a cough and had no reason to think it was Covid.’

After three days of being unable to keep water down, Chelsie called her medical team who advised her to go for a PCR test.

‘They told me that it was becoming more evident that continuing sickness in pregnant women was a symptom of Covid,’ she said.

Chelsie took a test and the next day it came back positive.

‘That’s when my temperature started to soar and I became breathless,’ she said.

She became increasingly unwell and Chelsie’s husband Patrick, 32, called St Michael’s Hospital in Bristol for advice.

Doctors checked her and the baby over as she hadn’t eaten for a week.

‘We were so worried about the baby,’ she said.

‘Thankfully the baby was ok but I was very poorly and I got transferred straight to the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI). My oxygen levels were dropping rapidly.’

Chelsie was taken to intensive care, and within days, her condition became so critical doctors had to deliver the baby by C-section.

‘The last thing I can remember was watching the Euro football finals on my phone from my ITU bed,’ she said.

‘By midnight on Tuesday I was so critical they decided to deliver him. They had to put me into a coma as they needed to put me on a ventilator to get my oxygen levels up.’

Little Raphael was born at 2am on Wednesday, July 14, 12 weeks and one day early, weighing just 2lbs 4 oz.

He was taken immediately to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Southmead Hospital.

Doctors tried to wake Chelsie up after five weeks, but she kept picking up infections.

A team from St Thomas’s Hospital in London made their way to Bristol to perform an intensive life support treatment before transferring her to capital, where she remained for 21 days.

When she finally woke up, Chelsie was shocked to discover Raphael was already five weeks old.

She said: ‘He was six weeks old when I first got to hold him. They placed him on my chest. It was so wonderful to be able to see him and smell him for the first time.’

Chelsie was finally discharged from hospital in September, with Raphael arriving home shortly after.

She has now had her first Covid vaccination and is awaiting her second dose.

‘I had to wait due to the medication I was on,’ she said. ‘But as soon as the medication finished, I had it.

‘I do regret not having the jab when it was offered and wonder whether things would have been different if I did have it.

‘I wouldn’t want any other family going through what we have. The truth of the matter is that we could have both died.’

She added: ‘The risks of not being jabbed are far more than having the vaccination itself.

‘I am one of the lucky ones. I got to cuddle my baby. But there are some mothers who will never have that joy. All because they didn’t have a simple vaccine.’

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