Sharjah woman recovers from COVID-19 to deliver baby on her birthday
Parents who tested positive for coronavirus welcome their little bundle of joy
Sharjah: An Indian woman in Sharjah, who recovered from coronavirus recently, delivered a healthy baby boy in Ajman’s Thumbay University Hospital on her birthday on May 21.
Sanam, 32, tested positive for COVID-19 days after her husband Sunny was diagnosed with coronavirus.
Gulf News reported the plight of the couple last month after they were quarantined in different hotels in Sharjah at the same time.
Both have since completely recovered. “I am relieved. Of late we were so stressed that I couldn’t even get a pregnancy gender test to determine the sex of the child. So there was an element of surprise too,” Sanam said from her hospital bed on Sunday. “I am anaemic and since I also suffered from coronavirus, the risk factors were quite high. The doctors said I won’t be able to endure labour pains so they went for a cesarean delivery. It was slated for May 22 but was rescheduled to an earlier day. By sheer coincidence, it happened to be my birthday,” she added.
Sunny said they went through agonising times in recent weeks. “Now all of that seems a distant memory, the surgery was complicated and lasted more than three hours. Thankfully everything went well,” said the businessman who runs a foodstuff company in the UAE.
A resident of Sharjah’s Al Taawun neighbourhood, Sunny said he first suspected he had been infected when he developed high fever and body ache on March 21.
“I feared passing the infection to my six-year-old son and Sanam who was in her third semester of pregnancy so I immediately isolated myself,” he recalled.
“The alarm bells rang when Sanam also got fever followed by a cough. By now, my condition had also worsened so I got myself tested at a health facility in Al Mizhar. Their lab report confirmed my worst fears – I had coronavirus,” he added. Sunny said he was asked to report to the Preventive Medicine Centre in Sharjah and was then taken to a hotel in an ambulance for quarantine.
“A few days later my wife was quarantined in another hotel a few kilometres away from my own. We used to speak on the phone and try to motivate each other as Sanam waited for her COVID-19 test reports. I got extremely worried when her results came out positive but we remained hopeful and overcame the disease,” he said. “We can’t wait to go home with our little bundle of joy,” he added.