I nearly died giving birth. When I woke, I had no memory of my husband or baby... and couldn't speak English. If only doctors hadn't missed the terrifyingly common symptoms

Samina Ali struggled to take in the nurse's instructions as she carefully explained how to hold a newborn baby.

This was Samina's first time meeting her child after his traumatic birth five days earlier had put both their lives in peril – and left her in an induced coma.

She felt bemused as her baby, named Ishmael, was lifted out of his incubator and transferred to her lap.

But as her family gathered around the hospital bed to watch, cooing at the sight, their delight quickly turned to horror as Samina, whose vision and motor skills were still severely impaired, fumbled with her grip and almost dropped the child.

Luckily, the nurse swooped in to catch him – though Samina was merely relieved that someone else had taken responsibility for a baby she'd forgotten ever having.

The then 29-year-old had suffered the potentially fatal condition of preeclampsia during pregnancy, though her symptoms - headaches, unexplained itching, bloating, and vomiting - had been brushed off by medics, so it remained undiagnosed. 

But during an excruciating painful, drawn-out labor, the condition escalated terrifyingly into full-blown eclampsia.

'In my medical file, the doctors wrote that during the cardiologist's examination, I had a grand mal seizure, the most severe type of seizure a person can have,' Samina writes in her newly released memoir Pieces You'll Never Get Back.

The seizure cut off the oxygen supply to her brain for a catastrophic 30 seconds.

'The chest pains the doctor had dismissed with Alka-Seltzer had been a heart attack. The head pain the doctor had insisted was me being dramatic... was the result of ischemia, the cascade of minor strokes.

'At the front of my head, on the right side, I had also suffered a potentially lethal subarachnoid hemorrhage... Fluid was filling my lungs and brain and flesh. My organs began shutting down.'

As her body started to convulse violently, medics pinned her down and injected her with magnesium sulfate, making her fall into a coma.

When she awoke five days later, 'the brain damage was so extensive that it even kept me from grasping that anything was wrong with me.'

Her husband - her college sweetheart - was suddenly a stranger to her, and the entire memory of her pregnancy was forgotten.

Remarkably, another side effect was that the Indian-born American's ability to speak English – a language she'd been fluent in since childhood – had vanished, with only the memory of her native Urdu remaining.

'What are you doing here?' she asked her worried parents in Urdu when she came around.

They had emigrated to the US in 1971, and Samina spent the first 19 years of her life divided between the ancient city of Hyderabad and Minneapolis. She met her husband, Scott, at a graduate writing program in the Pacific Northwest and Ishmael was born in 1998, after the couple had been together five years.

Now, 27 years on, 56-year-old Samina's soul-baring memoir chronicles her long battle to recover her lost identity. She says it took three years for her to feel even remotely normal; seven for her to be able to truly connect with her son. Tragically, however, she had to accept that much of her life would never be remembered.

'Giving birth to my son, it turned out, required that I bury my old self,' she writes. 'It was one of the most difficult challenges I faced during the healing process. 

'How do you accept that everything you are – your perceptions of the world and your physical abilities and your likes and dislikes and your memories of your past and your attachments to others – are nothing more than the soft white substance of your brain?'

Through intensive therapy – over a number of years – Samina gradually recovered many of her physical and mental faculties, like learning to walk, speak, and even her sense of self - her beliefs and values.

She now recalls that, during the later stages of her pregnancy, she sensed something was 'off', though doctors largely dismissed her complaints.

During a labor that ended up requiring four hours of pushing and a forceps delivery, Samina began suffering chest pains and intense headaches she describes as feeling like 'an animal nesting in the spongy ridges of my brain'.

Soon after the birth, her son stopped breathing, and he was rushed to a neonatal intensive care unit.

Samina, meanwhile, suffered a series of violent seizures. Her chest pain had been a heart attack, while her headache had been multiple brain bleeds.

'My blood platelet count was crashing to dangerous levels,' she writes. 'My organs began shutting down.'

Soon she was being treated by nine different consultants including an OBGYN, a neurologist, a pulmonologist, a cardiologist, and an infectious diseases expert. 

But even this team of top doctors couldn't have predicted that the crippling health battle was just beginning.

Rousing from the coma, she pushed away Scott as he tried to embrace her. She thought it was a rather forward move by a man she felt she didn't know.

She immediately recognized her biological family, however, who stood around her bed with concerned faces.

'Since my mom and dad and two brothers have been in my life from its earliest moments, they're stored in the deepest recesses of my brain so, despite the extensive trauma, I knew them right away,' she writes.

More recent recollections of them had evaporated.

'I had no memory of my three-year estrangement from my dad. No memory that my older brother lived and worked in New York as an investment banker while my younger brother was a neurosurgery resident in Michigan.'

It was only when she overheard her father talking to a neurologist later that she even understood that something was wrong with her.

They said that the fact she'd even survived was a miracle.

Slowly but surely after two weeks in the neuro-ICU unit at the hospital she taught herself English again, re-forming the broken neural pathways just as her new son's mind was expanding and learning.

'He and I just happened to build new circuits at about the same time,' Samina writes, describing how she would sit with Ishmael in the garden, reading from his baby books. 'As I did, I challenged myself to say each word correctly.'

Equally, her physical disabilities required serious work. She didn't need a wheelchair, but her balance was off. 

It improved relatively quickly. Over two months, she forced herself to walk for longer stretches around the house and back yard. 

At the same time, she had to regain her muscle memory and full vision. 'So many tiny functions that we don't even think of, and which come automatically to us,' Samina writes. 'I became painstakingly aware of each and every one of those tiny functions and how they all have to work in concert with me to take one simple step.'

As for her memories, Samina found old photos – including her wedding album and pictures that Scott had taken during her pregnancy – particularly useful.

'My brain clicked together stray puzzle pieces,' she writes. 

Slowly, random memories from her childhood – frequenting the spice markets in Hyderabad and being top of her class in high school – would come into focus.

Then, while looking at her framed wedding photograph one day, the memories suddenly came flooding back 'like a movie on hyper speed'.

'I was studying it when the front door opened and Scott walked in, arrived home from work,' she writes. 'That was all it took.

'All at once, he existed inside the framed photo in my hands and he had materialized out of nothing to stand before me. I blinked. In the seconds it took for him to greet me and my mom, my brain clicked together stray puzzle pieces and my memories returned so rapidly... 

'There I was, meeting Scott for the first time... my attraction to him so immediate and so raw that I found myself making an excuse to rush away from him.

'My brain replayed pivotal moments, covering our five years together so swiftly that, as a neurological reflex, my body went absolutely still while my eyes blinked uncontrollably like a camera shutter, documenting it all.'

More than anything, however, the main driver of Samina's recovery was her dogged determination to return to her beloved career of writing.

She had been in the process of writing her first novel when she was pregnant.

At first her aphasia – a language disorder often brought on by stokes – meant that her typing and her speech were almost entirely nonsensical.

In one instance, she couldn't even remember how to spell the name of the heroine in the new novel she was drafting.

But improvements came slowly, and she was determined.

'Although I couldn't have known it at the time, by forcing my brain to put words together, I was also forcing it to create new neural connections,' she says.

Her doctors, meanwhile, were stunned by her recovery – calling the turnaround a miracle.

In hospital, they had told her family the brain damage was so extensive, she'd be lucky if she died.

'Don't think of the machines as extending her life,' they said gently, 'but rather as prolonging her death.'

Incredibly, just three and a half years after Ishmael's birth, her neurologist gave her the news that an MRI scan of her brain had finally come back normal - though some of her memories would never fully come back.

However, with the joy of her recovery came a new heartbreak: it was around this time that Samina and Scott called quits on their marriage.

'We were no longer bonded by love, but by trauma,' she writes. 

'I was no longer the young woman who gleefully married him right after graduation from the writing program. After having spent my childhood years trying to become the person my parents expected me to be, I couldn't now try to become the woman Scott remembered.

'He was depleted from caring for me and eager for a fresh start at a new life. Now that I could envision a future, I was excited to step into it.'

But while one might assume that Samina's ordeal would have put paid to any desire for another child, she defied expectation once again, remarrying and becoming pregnant with a daughter, Zaara, eight years later.

She developed the same symptoms of pre-eclampsia at 34 weeks. But this time, her obstetrician took no chances. She had an emergency C-section the very day trouble was detected.

Pieces You'll Never Get Back - A Memoir of Unlikely Survival by Samina Ali is published by Catapult