After giving birth to triplets Marisa the mother spent six days in a coma and lost her memory of why she wasn’t pregnant. How She’s Recovered

• Moments after Marisa Christie gave birth to three healthy baby girls last year, she experienced a rare and life-threatening complication and was put into a medically induced coma
• When she woke up six days later, Marisa tells PEOPLE she had no memory of giving birth, and even initially thought she had been in “a car accident or something,” which seemed like the “only reasonable for why I was not pregnant anymore”
• Although she says that “some days are harder than others,” Marisa is now doing okay — and is extremely grateful for all the doctors, family and friends who stepped up in her family’s time of need

The idea of balancing three babies on top of their four-year-old son Grayson made her husband anxious for months after Marisa Christie and her husband Dylan found out they were expecting triplets.

“I was like, oh my gosh, this is actually happening,” Dylan, 30, of Tomball, Texas, tells PEOPLE. “I became a little more composed as we drew nearer. It is one of those situations for which you cannot adequately prepare.

After Marisa, 30, gave birth to Charlotte, Kendall, and Collins, three healthy baby girls, via planned cesarean section at Memorial Hermann the Woodlands Medical Center on the morning of August 21, 2024, Dylan was at last at ease.

But the photo would never happen.

Within seconds, “Marisa kind of came up off the bed, both of her arms raised, and she made a noise, her vital signs and everything became deeply abnormal,” says Dr. Amber Samuel, Marisa’s maternal fetal physician and medical director of Obstetrix Maternal-Fetal Medicine Specialists of Houston. 

“She wasn’t breathing,” adds Samuel, “and didn’t have a heartbeat. That was the moment that we declared this is an AFE (amniotic fluid embolism), because nothing else really looks like that.”