This story is part of a larger conversation on the Black Maternal Health Crisis.
When Anthony Wallace first met his late wife, Dr. Chaniece Wallace, they were in college at Alabama A&M University, an HBCU. They knew of each other but didn’t date until 2013, about a year after they each graduated from their undergrad programs.
Chaniece and Anthony kept in touch while she completed an internship with Riley Hospital in Indianapolis after graduation. “We just started virtually, you know, getting to know one another, having conversations,” he tells SheKnows.
When Chaniece completed her internship, she moved back home to Mobile, Alabama, and she and Anthony began dating seriously. Six months later, on Dec. 21, 2013 — the day after his birthday — Anthony proposed.
“I did it so she wouldn’t expect it,” Anthony says. “She was thinking the whole weekend was about me, and I was like, ‘Nah, this is gonna be about us.’”
Anthony and Chaniece were engaged for a year and a half. Chaniece applied, was accepted, and enrolled in medical school. The two tied the knot on April 25, 2015. They lived in Birmingham while Chaniece was in medical school and then moved to Tuscaloosa shortly after they were married.
When it was time for Chaniece to find a pediatric medicine residency, she matched with Riley Hospital in Indiana — the same hospital where she had completed her internship, four years prior. Anthony, an educator licensed to teach both elementary school and high school, supported his wife’s career. In 2017, the couple moved to Indianapolis where Chaniece began her residency.
Anthony and Chaniece were enjoying being newlyweds, but by the end of 2019, both of them had been bitten by the baby bug.
“We made a decision that we’re gonna let God do his thing,” Anthony says. “It was like whatever happens, happens.”
Just a few months later, the couple was pregnant. Their baby girl was due to arrive in November, but she came early.
“I Felt Helpless”
On October 20, 2020, Chaniece went to the doctor for her third-trimester appointment when her provider noted that she was experiencing high blood pressure and that there was protein in her urine. She called Anthony, who was at work, to tell him that she was being admitted to the hospital. The doctors were concerned about the onset of preeclampsia.
“She asked me to come,” Anthony remembers. “I get there to the hospital and they’re trying to treat the high blood pressure.”
Chaniece was admitted to the hospital at 12:10 p.m. with severe hypertension, according to the complaint filed by the Wallace family attorney. Chaniece was not in pain at the time and reported “normal fetal movement.” Doctors worked to treat Chaniece’s high blood pressure with the medication Procardia, but it remained high two hours after she was admitted to the hospital. When Chaniece complained of pain, she was given morphine. Just before 3 p.m., Chaniece was ordered to receive magnesium sulfate in her IV to further treat her blood pressure. She didn’t actually get the treatment until an hour later, nearly four hours after she arrived in the hospital. At 4:28 p.m. doctors spoke with Chaniece about having an emergency C-section.
They noted she was developing HELLP syndrome, a life-threatening pregnancy complication caused by high blood pressure considered to be a variant of preeclampsia.
Baby Charlotte was delivered at 4:38 p.m. Anthony remembers being told that the C-section went well and that Chaniece would need to recover. Then, Chaniece’s condition deteriorated.
Her blood pressure dropped, as did her temperature. She was given more magnesium sulfate at 5:50 p.m. Over the course of the evening and into the night, Chaniece become hypotensive because of her now low blood pressure and hypothermic because of her low body temperature. She was drowsy and lethargic. She wasn’t eliminating waste from her body through her urine, which is the only way to remove magnesium from the body.
Just after 9 p.m., Chaniece was given Ativan, an anxiety medication. The complaint against the hospital records the administering of this drug as gross negligence.
Overnight, Chaniece passed a large blood clot. Her sodium levels were down, her magnesium levels were up, and she remained drowsy with low blood pressure and a low body temperature. She drifted off to sleep in the middle of conversation and doctors had trouble finding reflexes in her legs. Chaniece was monitored throughout the night and into the next morning.
At 4:50 a.m. she was given more magnesium sulfate even though Chaniece had only made 100 milliliters of urine since her delivery twelve hours earlier. Her sodium level continued to drop. According to the complaint, it went “completely undiagnosed and untreated for 72 hours.”
A side effect of low sodium is brain swelling, which can result in brain death. At 5 p.m. on October 24, 2020, a brain scan showed that Chaniece was brain dead. She was pronounced deceased at 5:39 p.m.
The complaint against the hospital details the painstaking hours that Chaniece languished, dying slowly over the course of days with little attention paid to her low blood pressure, low sodium, magnesium toxicity, and more.
Anthony remembers waking up on Oct. 21 — the morning after his daughter was born — to a frenzy of doctors in the room.
“I felt helpless. I felt like, ‘What can I do to protect my wife?’ But everything was literally out of my control,” he says.
Due to COVID protocols at the time, Anthony was not allowed to stay overnight at the hospital. The last thing he said to his wife was “I love you and I’ll be back in the morning.”
The Families Behind the Statistics
Chaniece was one of 861 people in the US who died of maternal causes in 2020, a number that rose to over 1,200 people in 2021, according to the CDC. The numbers follow a disturbing upward trend in maternal deaths that the CDC has been tracking for decadees, one that predominantly affects Black, indigenous, and Pacific Islander people.
It didn’t matter that Chaniece was highly educated, a resident medical doctor, because as statistics show, a Black woman with a college degree is more likely to die from giving birth than a white woman without a high school diploma. The trend holds steady across income levels, too. A 2023 study found that the richest Black families experienced “markedly worse” infant and maternal health outcomes than the poorest white families, and that rich Black mothers and babies were twice as likely to die compared to rich white mothers and babies.
During her pregnancy, Chaniece and Anthony had discussed the Black maternal health crisis. They talked about the dangers associated with pregnancy and childbirth for Black women. By that time, the issue had been mainstream due in large part to the work of Charles Johnson, IV, who founded 4Kira4Moms after his wife, Kira Johnson, died in 2016 after delivering her second child.
Johnson testified before Congress in 2018, explaining how he noticed blood in his wife’s catheter after her C-section. He watched his wife suffer for 10 hours before doctors took action. She died from massive internal bleeding. Her son was only 11 hours old.
Every statistic quoted in regards to the Black maternal health crisis represents a person, a family, someone who is loved and is missed. They have names: Kira Johnson, Chaniece Wallace, Sha’Asia Washington, Amber Issac…They have spouses, boyfriends, children, and their own parents who’ve outlived them.
These families, broken by childbirth, now must find a way through their grief, advocating for their lost loved one while also advocating for themselves, their children, and all Black women so that the cycle may never continue.
“Every single day I have to accept and part of grief is . . . denial. You don’t want to accept it,” Anthony says. “You don’t want to say the person who you said vows to, committed to, pictured growing old together, building a family together—you don’t want to accept that’s not your reality. That everything you envisioned and that you wanted together is not going to happen anymore.”
Advocating — and Raising a Daughter — Through Grief
During the course of our conversation with Anthony, his daughter Charlotte makes an appearance. Sitting on her father’s lap, looking at the screensaver of his cell phone, she coos and points as she speaks: “Mama, Dada.” Anthony responds gently, “You see, Mama and Dada? And who’s that? Charlotte.”
He says he plans to share as much about Chaniece with Charlotte as he can, a process that’s been painful in its own way. He only recently put his wedding and engagement photos back up around the house, including in Charlotte’s bedroom. “I had taken them down for a while because, for therapeutic reasons, they were just too hurtful,” he says. “But now I’m in a place where I’m able to handle that.”
But in sharing his memories of Chaniece with Charlotte, Anthony also laments what his daughter will miss out on without her mother around, such as Chaniece’s love of ballet.
“That was one of the things that could have been an experience that they shared together, that she could expose her to,” he says.
Knowing that Chaniece is not going to be able to nurture Charlotte and love on her with maternal instinct hurts him every day. But his sorrow is also for himself: For the loss of his wife of only five years, his partner for seven. It’s an ineffable feeling, one he believes others in their family don’t necessarily experience as intensely as he does.
“They miss her,” Anthony says, choking back tears, “but they don’t miss her the way I miss her.”
You can learn more about the health crisis facing Black moms and birthing people here.
A version of this article was originally published in 2022.
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