A 7-month-old baby squealed with laughter as his father lifted him toward a wind chime hanging from the front porch of the Lovejoy family farm. The sound of the baby’s laugh drifted across the property’s 85 acres in Forward Township.
Hannah Lovejoy stood at the bottom of the porch steps, watching her family with adoration.
The wind chime hung as a memorial to Lovejoy’s late parents, who once owned the farm. For Lovejoy, it also served as a reminder of the generations of female-led family she once feared she might never fully join as a mother.
Just days before her first Mother’s Day, Lovejoy said it is the moments that carry a different weight — the kind of ordinary memories she might never have had after a cardiac emergency nearly took her life one month after giving birth.
“It’s the little things – whenever he snuggles into me, and it makes me realize that ‘OK, not that I was going to die anyway, but this really makes it all worth it,’ ” Lovejoy said.
She delivered her son, Gabriel Weiner Lovejoy, on Sept. 14, 2025. Although the pregnancy was full-term and largely normal, the baby experienced breathing complications after birth and spent two weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, a specialized hospital unit providing round-the-clock care for newborns.
A medical crisis
After returning home, the family began settling into a new routine until, just a month later, Taylor Weiner, Lovejoy’s husband, found her slumped over and turning blue.
On Oct. 18, Weiner, who had returned a few days earlier from a work trip as a fireworks technical producer, and Lovejoy prepared to host friends for dinner. The evening abruptly changed.
Lovejoy had been experiencing sharp pain between her shoulder blades. She decided to take a shower to try and feel better before company arrived.
“I don’t remember getting out of the shower. I don’t remember getting dressed,” Lovejoy said.
She just remembers being on the couch.
Weiner checked on her after she got out of the shower before heading to put the baby in the bassinet and beginning to clean the dining table.
Weiner said he called out once again to check on Lovejoy as he worked. He received no response.
When he found her again on the couch, she was not breathing.
“It was one of the longest moments of my life, but also just everything moving so quickly, you know, thinking back it’s kind of in flashes,” said Weiner, remembering the trauma of almost losing his wife.
He immediately called 911 and, under the guidance of the emergency dispatcher, began CPR. He continued chest compressions until paramedics arrived and took over care.
First responders quickly attached a defibrillator, a device used to deliver an electric shock to restore a normal heart rhythm. She was then airlifted to the nearest Allegheny Health Network hospital, Allegheny General Hospital, which was about a 45-minute drive away.
Lovejoy had suffered a spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD, which sent her into cardiac arrest.
“This is a sudden event where the layers of artery wall essentially separate,” said Dr. Indu Poornima, Lovejoy’s cardiac doctor and division director of clinical cardiology and imaging at AHN.
SCAD causes blood flow through the artery to become suddenly restricted, similar to what happens during a heart attack, Poornima said.
Lovejoy was in the hospital for 11 days, during which Weiner stayed at his parents’ home closer to the hospital. They helped him take care of the baby and visit Lovejoy.
“Her heart was not doing well at all. She was in a state called cardiogenic shock, which is when the heart is really not pumping blood like it’s supposed to. So she had to be put on what we call extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO,” Poornima said.
ECMO is a temporary, lifesaving machine that takes over heart and lung function so the heart can rest. It pumps blood out of the body, adds oxygen, removes carbon dioxide and returns the blood.
While at the hospital, Lovejoy underwent two surgeries and one interventional procedure, a heart catheterization.
“I was so mad that I had the breathing tube in, and I couldn’t talk,” Lovejoy said. “I remember wanting to write and making gestures.”
After the first two days, doctors determined Lovejoy could be taken off the breathing tube.
“I remember someone saying, ‘This is going to suck’ and yanking the tube out. And that was sort of [the] first moment where everything was high definition, whereas before everything had been sort of dim and just flashes,” Lovejoy said.
The cardiology team placed an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator combined with a pacemaker into Lovejoy to help manage dangerous, fast heart rhythms by delivering electrical shocks to reset the heart.
So far, she hasn’t needed it.
The recovery
Poornima said SCAD accounts for about 1% to 4% of all heart attacks, but 90% of cases occur in women. SCAD is also responsible for 40% to 50% of all heart attacks that occur in pregnant women.
“We think that the hormonal changes that happen in that person makes their arterial walls more susceptible to these things,” Poornima said, although research has not been extensive enough to determine a direct cause.
For Lovejoy, like many women, SCAD was traumatic.
“I was really afraid that being in the hospital, he [the baby] wouldn’t know who I was, and he wouldn’t bond with me,” she said. “I am very anxious that it’ll happen again, even with all of the life saving techniques, and I’m terrified to leave him without a mother.”
Poornima said SCAD leaves many new moms with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The psychological stress that is experienced by these women is so high because most women who have SCAD are otherwise very, very healthy people,” Poornima said. “You’re always nervous that it’s going to happen again, because you don’t even know why it happened in the first place.”
The family said they don’t have any major plans for Mother’s Day beyond enjoying each other’s company.
“It seems like people who are in the medical field are the only ones to understand how serious this was, how catastrophic this was and how, again, miraculous and lucky it is that I’m here,” Lovejoy said.