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UVA Health and UVA Community Health teamed up to not only save the life of a 24-year-old woman — but also to bring her new bundle of joy into the world safely.

Keylin, already the mother of a six-year-old son, reached 25 weeks into another pregnancy earlier this year, when she was diagnosed with a large mass in her pelvis at a clinic in Prince William County, Virginia. The clinic referred her to Carolyn Matthews, MD, who, coincidentally, had just joined UVA Community Health as its first gynecologic oncologist.

One UVA Health Team

Dr. Matthews contacted Donald Dudley, MD, Maternal-Faternal Medicine, and Kari Ring, MD, Gynecologic Oncology, at UVA Health in Charlottesville, where Keylin got an appointment the next day for an ultrasound and examination. And only five days after that, Linda Duska, MD, also in Gynecologic Oncology, operated on Kaylin.

"To have coordinated all those activities within five days of first touching a patient and really changing the entire course of her pregnancy is remarkable," says Zan Zaidi, MD, Chief Medical Officer, UVA Community Health — where the story returned full circle, with an even happier ending, as you'll see in this video: