Hailey Okula, a 33-year-old nurse and social media star from Southern California, died tragically just after welcoming her newborn son.
On March 29, mere minutes after delivering her baby boy Crew, Okula suffered from the rare pregnancy complication amniotic fluid embolism (AFE), according to KTLA.
“We hear the baby cry and we were excited he was finally here,” her husband Matthew Okula told KTLA. “She made a comment about how big he was. I grabbed her hand and said, ‘He’s beautiful and I will see you over there in a moment.’ We were so excited and then it took such a quick turn.
“It hadn’t been a minute or two later that the doctor came in and told me they were doing CPR and her heart stopped,” he added.
Hailey Okula worked as an emergency room nurse and had shared her fertility journey with her nearly 470,000 Instagram followers until successfully becoming pregnant through IVF.
In a heartfelt Instagram post on April 1, Matthew Okula announced his wife’s passing, saying, “Hailey’s strength was unparalleled. Words can’t describe how badly we wanted to be parents. After years of infertility struggles and a long, challenging IVF process, we were overjoyed to be expecting Crew.”
He went on, “I will never forget the moment I broke down, apologizing for the toll the process would take on her. She held my face, looked into my eyes, and said, ‘We are a team, and we’ll get through this together.’ That was Hailey. A fighter. A teammate. A woman who would do anything for the people she loved.
“Though her time with us was tragically cut short, Hailey’s love for Crew was limitless, long before he entered this world. She would have been the most amazing mom,” Okula added.
Later in his statement, Okula shared his commitment to keeping his wife’s legacy alive by continuing her RN New Grads business, a program created to support and provide resources for nurses fresh out of school.
According to Cleveland Clinic, AFE is rare but deadly and happens when amniotic fluid enters a pregnant woman’s bloodstream before, during, or right after childbirth, causing cardiac arrest or unstoppable bleeding from the uterus or C-section incision. The condition affects just one in every 40,000 deliveries across the United States.
“It’s about 100 people a year in the United States that [amniotic fluid embolism] happens to,” Okula told KTLA. “That’s a lot of broken hearts and shattered families. Hailey would want to use this right now to see how we can figure out a way to not let this happen to other families.”
Okula, who works as a Los Angeles firefighter, remembered one of the last moments with his wife, saying he was “just talking to her about Crew, and I just told her I’m going to be the best dad I can be for him.”
A GoFundMe campaign was launched to help with funeral expenses and has already collected more than $385,000 toward a $450,000 goal.
