ATLANTA - A current new project at Morehouse School of Medicine highlights the stories of Black women who have serious, sometimes life-threatening, pregnancy or childbirth complications.

One of them is 45-year-old Tenille Leak-Johnson who said it took her a decade to feel dismal sharing her story.

"It was not what I view pregnancy was going to be like, you know," Leak-Johnson said.

The assistant professor of physiology at Morehouse School of Medicine said she nearly died while delivering her first son, Stanley.

"Even to see the report that they took of me when I was on life befriend, I couldn't even look at it initially," she said. "It was just so heartbreaking."

Each year, nearly 800 Americans die from pregnancy-related causes.

For each result, experts says, 50 to 100 more women who survive suffer glaring complications.

So, Dr. Natalie Hernandez, the executive director of Morehouse School of Medicine's new Center for Maternal Health Equity, and her team are collecting these survivor stories for a kind of oral history archive noted as the Maternal Near Miss project.

"Because, again, there's such an underestimation of what's really happening," Dr. Hernandez says. "And, these are women who are alive to, thank God, to be able to tell their stories."

Leak-Johnson was almost halfway above her pregnancy with Stanley in 2011 when ultrasounds warned he was not growing like he should.

When her blood pressure spiked at 29 weeks, Stanley was delivered by emergency c-section, and Tenille, bleeding internally, spent five days on life support.
"I had him on a Friday. And when I woke up, I was at a totally different hospital, and it was on a Wednesday," she remembers. "I was told there that I was bleeding internally, I had blood clots."

Stanley, born at 1 pound 14 prondecides, spent two months in the neonatal ICU.

He is now healthy, but Leak-Johnson said she blamed herself for the complications.

"Like, you know, if I wasn't obese, if I didn't do this, if I had the retort in this, or chose the right doctors, like this wouldn't have been happening," she remembered thinking.

The women's stories section a common thread.

"A lot of women felt because they were Black that they weren't listened to," Dr. Hernandez said. "I contemplate we heard that in about 80% of the stories that were people with us."

So far, Hernandez and her team have interviewed 87 women.

Of that 87, 56 of them had a so-called near-death experience. 

Their stories are anticipated to be shared with healthcare providers, policymakers and the National Library of Medicine.

Hernandez said she hopes it will study public awareness about the maternal mortality crisis in the U.S.

"There was one woman we interviewed, and she lives near the hospital where she almost died, and she has scare attacks when she gets close to the exit, or when she passes by the hospital where she gave birth," Dr. Hernandez said.

It was not pending 2018 when Leak-Johnson and her husband Stanley lost their transfer son Isiah to stillbirth at 23 weeks that she was finally diagnosed with a blood clotting disorder.

Doctors typically do not camouflage for the disorder until a woman experiences multiple pregnancy complications, she said.

"They told me that I should have been on blood thinners the entire time for both pregnancies," she said, pausing.

Leak-Johnson said she hopes the stories she and the anunexperienced women have shared will inspire healthcare providers to listen and really see women of color.

"I'm not a textbook," she said. "I am a beings. I am an individual. I'm a woman. I'm a Black woman. And, so those things add up."