(birds chirping)
- Hey. - Hi!
- (laughing) How are you?
- [Erin] Good, how are you?
- Good. How have you been?
- Busy.
- Good. - Yeah.
- I don't remember we brought y'all down this hall
or the other hall, but we brought all the beds
down through the hall.
And this was our lobby and it had been
set up kinda like this.
But what we did is we cleared out all of these chairs
and just basically made it a makeshift hospital wing
and had partitions and just patients
lining this entire hall.
- I remember that.
(calming music)
That day, everybody started evacuating for the storm.
Me and my boyfriend, Beau,
we were packing up.
I was like very exhausted all day long.
Like I just went to bed and just slept all day
and they were like, "Okay, something's not right with Erin."
And then that night, the pain was so bad
I couldn't even sit up in a chair.
He went to wake up his parents,
like everybody in the house and they were like,
"Erin is like she's crying her eyes out."
They thought it was my appendix.
- The ER doctor called me and said,
"Hey, I have a patient down here.
She's got blood in her belly.
I don't actually know where the blood is coming from.
There's a lot of blood
and I need you to come down here now."
I was the only surgeon that was on staff for the storm.
We didn't have general surgeons.
And so regardless of where it was bleeding from, I was it.
And when I went and examined Erin,
I mean she was terribly hurting.
You couldn't touch her belly.
She couldn't move.
Didn't have to talk to her very long,
just to say, "We need to do surgery."
The first thing I did was actually take out
all of the blood from her belly.
And once I was able to remove most of it,
I could see that it was actively coming from her ovary.
- I'm 22 years old and I could possibly lose my ovaries
and not be able to have kids.
Like that was the biggest thing going through my head.
(Erin sniffles)
I couldn't stop crying.
Beau, he was sitting in the chair next to me,
next to the bed and he was just like
shaking his head like, "It's gonna be okay."
Like, "Calm down."
So he helped calm me down.
Him just being there, that was great.
It was kinda mind blowing.
Like I was in school.
I was a college cheerleader,
so that was a little heartbreaking
'cause she was like, "You can't cheer."
(audience cheering)
- It took a while actually to stop
the spot that was bleeding on her ovary.
Like usually these things,
they're pretty quick 30 minute cases.
I was in there for several hours
and that's when the storm was rolling in.
I don't know how much you know,
'cause I know we were trying to make our patients
feel like they were very safe
and this was a healing safe place.
But one of the very first things that happened
was the elevator shaft,
we lost the roof of the elevator shaft.
And so we lost access to our ability to really move patients
like we normally would move patients.
You stood here in the middle of the storm.
It was just like a train.
Like a loud freight train
and you're standing right next to it.
This spot, just thinking about it, just gives me tingles.
There was the pressure in different parts of the hospital.
You'd go to try to open a door that typically you could open
and there was so much pressure
you actually couldn't open doors
that you were used to opening.
It was terrifying.
We still had access to the freight elevator...
And did you come down that elevator?
- [Erin] I'm pretty sure. - The freight elevator
is right next to the wall
and it felt like it was moving in the wind with the storm
and that was terrifying.
But that's how we moved everybody down.
(wind whistling)
A lot of people had slept through the night.
I had been up the whole night with Erin.
- She saved 70% of it.
She found, I think, almost over half a liter
of blood in my stomach.
And the fact that she was able to
do that miracle, like God helped her.
It was unbelievable what she did.
And I'm so blessed that she did it.
Oh.
- In a typical situation, she'd normally be able to go home.
We didn't have that option.
So, she had to stay with us through the storm.
(wind gusting)
(thunder crackling)
(gentle uplifting music)
(birds chirping)
- Beau was just like...
I think he kept asking you when we can leave.
Like, "When we can leave? When we can leave?"
"Like, can we leave now?"
And I was like, "You need to be patient."
"She's gonna tell us when to leave."
- Beau kept saying, "Yes, can we go?"
I remembered I'd be like,
"Beau, the streets are still blocked.
You have nowhere to go." (laughs)
- He was tired of sleeping in the hospital bed.
Yeah, we were really excited to leave.
And the cop down the road stopped us
and he was like you can't go any further.
And Beau was like, "She got out of the hospital
and we're not going back there."
(Kellin laughs)
"You have to let us go."
And he was like, "Okay."
We started on LA 1 and then it was literally blocked,
like trees were blocked.
And he was in a truck, he still couldn't go around
and so we hit the highway all the way to Thibodaux,
and we just rode the shoulder.
No service, no cell phone.
Like my mom and all didn't know
I got out of surgery until like five days after.
- [Kellin] Wow.
- So that was exciting to just walk home.
Like get home to my mom and my sister
and my granny and they were all over there.
So it was like a whole reunion of like,
"I'm alive, I'm here, I'm okay."
(Kellin laughs)
- So this is our new labor unit
and they're what we call LDRPs,
which means labor delivered
and then you do your postpartum here.
So, your entire stay will be in this room.
(upbeat music)
- It really doesn't feel like it's been a year.
It was four weeks to recover post-surgery.
And now I get to cheer again. (chuckles)
My senior night at Nicholls, on the Nicholls football field,
Beau proposed in front of everybody at the football game.
(crowd cheering)
Yeah.
- [Kellin] And Nicholls did a write up.
- They did. They wrote a journal on us
and one of the questions was like,
"When did you know she was the one?"
And he was like, "I watched her sit in the hospital bed."
"I took care of her
and I wanna do that for the rest of my life."
So, and it was 'cause of her. (sobbing)
- Not because of me. (laughing)
- Yeah, you helped though.
♪ And if you ever feel lonely ♪
♪ Don't worry, I'll be on your side ♪
- Both ovaries are still functional,
so hopefully one day we'll be in this room together again.
- Yeah, that's the goal.
♪ Because you're the best friend forever ♪
- [Interviewer] Erin, do you have baby fever?
- Yeah.
(Erin and Kellin laughing)
I'm trying to get through grad school first, but yes.