AmyHorton

After years of trying to conceive a second child, Amy and her husband were elated when they found out they were expecting. “My pregnancy was fine—until it wasn’t,” she says.

Amy went into labor three weeks early and knew something wasn’t right. “We went to the hospital and discovered I was in way more trouble than anybody ever knew,” she says. Doctors performed an ultrasound and sadly, discovered that the baby had no heartbeat; Amy went in for an emergency C-section and delivered her stillborn daughter, Reagan.

But Amy’s ordeal wasn’t over yet. “At this point, [Reagan] was gone and I was fighting for my life,” she says. She spent a week in the ICU and received more than 30 units of blood products to replace the ones she’d lost during her hospital stay.

Today, she’s grateful for all of the blood donors who helped to save her life. “The gift that it is, you can almost feel the love that’s coming from those bags,” she says.