This is Shelly Cawley and her husband, Jeremy, from Concord, North Carolina.
When she went into labor in September last year, Shelly had to have an emergency C-section, the couple told BuzzFeed News.
Rylan, a healthy baby girl, arrived safely in the world — but a blood clot broke loose during the surgery and Shelly went into a coma.
Jeremy told Fox 46 that he was in shock. "The idea of going from the highest of emotions of having a child born...to the next moments where you think you're going to be saying goodbye to your wife within four or five hours. I was numb."
Shelly's friends and family prayed and urged her to keep fighting, but hours after giving birth she was still in a coma.
"The doctors told me that if Shelly wasn't able to do something on her own they didn't think they'd be able to keep her alive until the morning," Jeremy told BuzzFeed News.
Then one of Shelly's nurses, Ashley Manus, had an idea. "We knew skin to skin contact is very beneficial to an infant, so we thought, why not try it for a mom," Manus told WCNC-TV. "Because the baby [was] already thriving; she was doing great."
At first, Rylan was so content being placed on her mom that she fell right to sleep, so Jeremy and the medical staff had to work to make Rylan cry. When she finally did, something amazing happened.
"They say they saw a spike in my vitals when she did cry," Shelly told Fox 46. "They think that me hearing her subconsciously gave my body and my subconscious a reason to fight. That I still needed to be there for my baby."
Jeremy told BuzzFeed News the moment was joyful and said the spike in Shelly's vitals helped boost her health. Her condition stabilized, and she eventually woke up after a few days.
Shelly told WCNC-TV that Rylan's crying "was able to give me something to fight for."
One of the first meetings between mother and daughter was filmed on camera:
View this video on YouTube
"I remember waking up," she told BuzzFeed News. "It was like being caught between a dream and reality."
"I remember staring at Rylan's face and thinking she is the most beautiful baby in the world," she said.
"I know every mom feels that way but I felt like we had a special connection because of everything that had happened."