In February 2024, Brie Morgan Bauer, 35, was 27 weeks pregnant when her shoulders felt achy. Her husband had the flu a few weeks earlier, so she suspected she'd caught it. When she went to urgent care, however, she learned she was having contractions, and the baby was in distress.
Doctors needed to perform an emergency cesarean section. “The last thing I (remember) seeing was my husband with two of our boys,” Morgan Bauer of Overland Park, Kansas, tells TODAY.com.
“That’s the last thing I remember until waking ...
10 days later.” After delivering her son, Beau, on Feb. 17, Morgan Bauer began hemorrhaging, and her blood pressure faltered.
Doctors intubated her, placed her on dialysis and gave her various medications to treat an infection — streptococcal toxic shock syndrome from group A streptococcus. This is an uncommon but potentially deadly bacterial infection that leads to low blood pressure, organ failure, increased heart rate and rapid breathing, according to the . The Bauer family has been documenting their journey on , and they have almost 400,000 followers.
“I thought my wife was dying,” Reid Bauer, 35, tells TODAY.com. “In the past four months, (she) was pretty close as possible to death.
” When Morgan Bauer felt achy those months ago, she asked her mom to accompany her to an urgent care clinic. But there was a long wait, and they decided to visit an urgent care clinic where her obstetrician worked. “As I was lying on the OB urgent care bed, that.