An Angel Gave My Baby CPR

Hannah Slovitch grew up in a secular Jewish home in the United States. She had never heard of hashgacha pratis, Divine Providence, the belief that Hashem is involved in every detail of our lives. But after she got married, Hannah began noticing signs that couldn’t be dismissed.

“When I was pregnant with my second child, the doctor found a mass near the fetus during an ultrasound,” she recalls. “He told me not to worry. He said it was nothing.” But just a few weeks later, Hannah went into labor at only 24 weeks. Her baby boy was born weighing just 673 grams, barely over one pound.

That same week, Hannah was diagnosed with advanced stage 4 metastatic cancer. The mass the doctor had seen? It turned out to be cancer. The doctors went back to review her bloodwork from early in the pregnancy and were shocked they had missed such clear signs.

Looking back, Hannah sees this late diagnosis as the first sign of Hashem’s hand in her life. “If the doctors had realized I had cancer earlier,” she says, “they would have pressured me to end the pregnancy so I could start treatments. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

Despite the dire prognosis for both mother and child, Hannah was deeply grateful to have brought her son into the world. But the doctors weren’t hopeful. They told her the baby likely wouldn’t survive. And if he did, they warned, he would face serious developmental issues and long-term health problems.

Standing in the middle of this storm, Hannah began to pray and take on some mitzvot.. “I didn’t have real faith yet,” she says honestly, “but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.” Three months later, her son was discharged from the hospital doing much better than expected. Her faith began to take root.

But the story didn’t end there.

A few nights after they returned home, Hannah woke up in the middle of the night with a sudden, overwhelming urge to pick up her baby. He was sleeping peacefully in his crib, but something deep inside pushed her. She turned on the light, lifted him into her arms, and held him gently while he slept.

Two hours passed. Then, without warning, she noticed his little body had gone limp. He wasn’t breathing.

“It was a miracle,” Hannah says with emotion. “If I hadn’t felt the need to hold him, he would have been in his crib when he stopped breathing and I wouldn’t have noticed in time. But because I was holding him, I saw it happen and could start CPR right away. I’m a nurse, so I knew what to do.”

What happened next still gives her chills.

While performing CPR, she realized she needed to call for an ambulance but she was completely alone with the baby and her toddler, who was only two years old. How could she stop compressions to use the phone?

“Suddenly I felt a presence behind me,” she says quietly. “I heard a voice in my head say, ‘Put the baby down and call for help. The CPR will continue until you come back.’” Hannah didn’t question it. She gently laid her baby down, picked up the phone, and called emergency services.

And somehow, the CPR continued.

“I could actually see and hear air moving into his lungs,” she says. “And when the ambulance arrived, the paramedics told me they had heard CPR in the background while they were talking to me on the phone!”

Was it an angel? A miracle? A direct act of Hashem? Hannah doesn’t claim to know. What she does know is that her son lived.

Today, that tiny preemie is a completely healthy, bright, and joyful child. He’s already attending a religious school where he’s learning about hashgacha pratis at a much earlier age than his mother did.

As for Hannah, she recovered from cancer and now keeps a kosher home and observes Shabbat. From that intense, painful period, what remains is a deep connection to Hashem and a heart full of gratitude for the open and hidden miracles her family experienced.