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Home › Mom of the Month

Michelle Mattingly

By Kelly Burgess

Each month, iParenting.com spotlights a mother who inspires and moves us, who embodies the qualities that we all admire in a person, a woman and a mother. Above all, the Mom of the Month is dedicated to her children. Rich or poor, famous or not, she shines as an example of what mothering is all about.

Michelle Mattingly of Mountain View, Calif., knows every day is a gift and every minute with her family is a miracle. Just a few months ago, doctors thought that they were going to lose both Michelle and the baby she was carrying. Things looked so bleak that at one point Dr. William Benitz, chief of neonatology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, said, "We were thinking we'd be lucky to get one live person out of this situation, and we didn't know which it would be."

An Uneventful Pregnancy

Everything seemed to be going just swimmingly for Michelle Mattingly as she awaited the birth of her second child. Already a stay-at-home mom to daughter Elektra, who was 18 months at the time, Mattingly was healthy and happy. She had been married for nearly three years to her college sweetheart, Leonard, who was stationed in Sunnyvale, Calif., as a petty officer second class with the U.S. Navy.

Then, after several days of Mattingly feeling ill with symptoms she attributed to the flu, Leonard brought his wife to the hospital on August 3, 2008. She was nauseated and in pain, and they wanted to just reassure themselves that everything, especially the baby, was OK.

"I thought maybe it was just a stomach flu, but I felt so bad and being pregnant I thought it would be best to just check it out," says Mattingly. "Once I got to the hospital, they took me to labor and delivery to observe me and hooked me up for the routine IV and monitoring. They tell me that I was up and conscious for another 24 hours, but I have no memory of that at all."

It wasn't long before doctors realized something was seriously wrong. Mattingly's liver was failing at an incredibly rapid rate. Within 24 hours of her admission to the hospital, her liver stopped working and she slipped into a coma. The medical team quickly determined that the pregnancy had not caused the liver failure and that Mattingly was too sick to survive a C-section.

At that point, the outlook was grim for both Mattingly and her baby, but the team of doctors, working with Leonard, decided to focus on saving her. They stabilized her, but also gave her steroids to strengthen the baby's lungs. On August 5, Mattingly's name went on the urgent list for a liver transplant. Doctors told Leonard that she could survive only another 72 hours, so they had to hope for a miracle.

Thus passed three harrowing days. Two livers were rejected, and they were running out of time. Finally, on day three, just when it seemed that they would lose both Mattingly and the baby, a matching, healthy donor liver became available. At 11:03 a.m., August 8, 2008, John Mattingly was delivered, 14 weeks early, and rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit at Packard's. His mother immediately underwent a liver transplant. Miraculously, Mother and Baby not only survived, they thrived. Mattingly spent a month in the hospital recovering, and John spent three months, growing and gaining strength. Doctors say both should have long, healthy lives ahead of them.

Learning from Adversity

Mattingly remembers nothing after her first few hours in the hospital. As soon as she was cognizant, she was told about the liver transplant and the birth of her son when she was in a coma. She couldn't be anything but grateful.

"It was a long road to recovery, and I needed a lot of help, which I got from my family, but it also made me introspective," Mattingly says. "I felt that this had happened for a reason and there had to be something for me to learn from this."

Beyond learning that there's nothing so precious as her family, especially her two healthy, beautiful babies, Mattingly realized that she wants to become an advocate both for organ donation and for giving blood. "Your experiences shape your life, and this experience brought home to me how important blood and organ donation are," she says. "My husband has always been an organ donor but I never thought that much about it until an organ donor saved my life. If it weren't for organ donation, I wouldn't be here."

Mattingly also points out that she needed more than 15 bags of blood and her son needed eight bags, so it's brought an awareness of the importance of keeping up the blood supply as well.

Right now, Mattingly is still getting her full strength back and working hard as a full-time mom to an infant and toddler – a tough job for anyone. In addition, she has to make taking care of herself an absolute priority as she can't afford the consequences of becoming run down.

"I have to schedule what I do and think of what the most important things I want to achieve each day are," says Mattingly. "If there are events like parties or people coming over, I have to plan for that and be sure I'm well-rested."

Mattingly also is dedicated to exercising and eating right to maintain optimum health. She says it shouldn't take a major health scare for any woman to make her health and well-being a priority.

"I don't know that I'd be so careful if I didn't have to be, but when you think about it there's no one more important in the life of the family than the mom and the wife," Mattingly says. "Don't wait until you're too sick to enjoy your family and your life to realize how important your health is."

Try Michelle Mattingly's recipe for Momma's Famous Fried Chicken!



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