Her precious hours with Brody: Cato Roller Derby Mom's moment of joy turns suddenly into tragedy

By Dave Tobin / The Post-Standard

On the last day of July, Kristie Rubino put the finishing touches on the Dr. Seuss mural she had been painting in her son’s nursery.

For nine months, Brody had been growing inside her. The next day, he would enter a new world. Right from the start, she wanted that world to be Seusslike: colorful and playful, unique and righteous, just like her.

What she couldn’t know was that just as Brody was meeting his new world, she would be leaving it.

At age 35, Rubino was about to become a mother for the first time, and she couldn’t have been happier. She was three years into a great relationship with her fiance, Jeff Wilkins. They’d met over the Internet, and they shared a love for skiing, snowboarding, hiking, mountain biking and the band Phish. They were living together in a house they had bought in the village of Cato.

Early in her pregnancy, she began a baby diary to her infant.

“Your Dad let me pick out all of the fun Dr. Seuss things I want to paint in your room,” she wrote Dec. 9, 2010. “When we went to sleep he had his hand on you to keep you safe.”

She had worked with children most of her adult life in day care and social services. Children loved her. She had a bachelor’s degree in art from Cazenovia College. With her creativity and energy, she designed activities that would bridge the needs and interests of children with varying abilities, said her sister, Koren Rubino, who worked with her at Jowonio, in Syracuse.

Having a baby would also make her a Derby Mom. She’d joined the Assault City roller derby team three years before, took the stage name “Raging Ruby” and the number 5 3/4, because she was just over 5 feet tall. She found roughing it up with her derby sisters a joyful connection and an outlet for her energy. In a diary entry just before Christmas, she told her infant that they’d received a gift: a onesie printed with the message, “My Derby Mom can beat up your Soccer Mom.”

She worked full time through her pregnancy at the Huntington Family Center, in Syracuse, where she helped families to get assistance. She stopped skating but took on the role of coordinating home derby bouts — overseeing things as varied as referee scheduling and promotion. She wasn’t one to easily relax.

Her pregnancy had been healthy and uneventful. In the final weeks, her platelet count dropped, and she was eating salads to boost it. On the Thursday before the birth, she became nauseous at work. Heartburn, she thought. But it was bad enough the next day that she drove herself to St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center to check it out. They examined her and sent her home.

Calm, then a turn

On the morning of her scheduled C-section Aug. 1, she awoke Wilkins and made him coffee. She awoke her mother, Nancy Matrafailo, of Jeffersonville, who would ride with them to the hospital. Rubino insisted on driving. They left Cato at 5 a.m.

Her platelet count was low that morning, too — a risk factor for someone receiving an epidural anaesthetic. Rubino wanted an epidural so she could stay awake during surgery. The medical staff decided to give her general anesthesia. She would be unconscious.

Brody was born at 8:59 a.m. Fifteen minutes after his birth, while Rubino’s anesthesia was wearing off. Brody nestled against his father’s bare chest, his first “skin contact” with a parent. Another 15 minutes passed, and Rubino was wheeled in to Wilkins and the baby. She was groggy and in pain. After an hour or so, she tried to nurse.

The medical staff gave her medication for her pain and to lower her blood pressure, which was staying stubbornly high. About 2 p.m., things began to settle down. She nursed again. Wilkins left the hospital to get sandwiches with her sister, Koren.

They returned to an anxious medical staff. Rubino’s blood pressure was climbing. Wilkins dropped his sandwich. The staff couldn’t bring down her blood pressure.

Wilkins held her hand, stroked her face and encouraged her to breathe deeply and slowly to lower her blood pressure. It seemed to help. She seemed calmer. After a night’s rest, medical staff told Wilkins, Rubino should be all right.

She wasn’t. Her calm turned into unresponsiveness. Her doctor ordered a CAT scan.

About 6:30 p.m., the neurosurgeon told the family that Rubino had had a large brain hemorrhage. Nothing would save her.

A rare condition

Why was Rubino’s blood pressure so high?

After Brody’s birth, Rubino’s family first learned about preeclampsia, a hypertensive condition unique to pregnancy and more apt to occur during a first pregnancy.

Preeclampsia and related hypertensive disorders impact 5 to 8 percent of all births in the United States, according to the Preeclampsia Foundation. Signs to watch for are high blood pressure, indications that the kidneys or liver are failing and reduced numbers of red blood cells or platelets, it says. A woman’s condition can go from mild to severe preeclampsia very quickly. One form can severely damage the mother’s liver.

The family won’t say much more about her cause of death. Wilkins said he has not read Rubino’s autopsy report.

In recent years, deaths of mothers during or immediately after childbirth have been increasing in the U.S. In 2008, the maternal mortality rate was 16.7 per 100,000 live births, according to theLancet, a British medical journal. Thirty-eight countries have lower maternal mortality rates than the U.S.