Darin Adams sits with Laura Adams at the Intermediate Care Unit at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City on Saturday, Feb. 20, 2016. Darin returned to work after taking time off to spend with Laura as she recovered from complications in the birth of their daughter in December. (Liz Martin/The Gazette)

For more than six months, Laura Adams has been fighting.

Though she spends most of her days lying in bed, every day is a fight. Her body is fighting to heal from a series of medical disasters. Her spirit is fighting to stay positive as she is unable to care for her baby daughter, walk her dogs or return to the job she loved as a music therapist.

She is fighting to regain her voice. Before a failing pancreas and a roller coaster of complications turned her life upside down, her coping mechanisms were music and singing. But her vocal cords suffered partial paralysis from the intubation tube that kept her breathing during the early days of her long hospital stay — days when, for a time, she could only trace letters on her husband’s palm to communicate.

In short, at 26 years old, Laura Adams is fighting to hold on to her life.

Her journey started more than a year ago, when she found out she was pregnant. Everything seemed to be going fine until about two weeks before her due date. On Dec. 6, 2015, she started having abdominal pain.

She had been having issues with gallstones, which pregnant women are more likely to get, so when she called her obstetrician-gynecologist, he said to take some Percocet and not worry.

Laura said she wants to tell her story in part because she wants people — women and their medical providers — to know to listen to their bodies.

“If you have a gut feeling something is wrong, it probably is. I just knew something was wrong,” she said later.

She took her doctor’s advice, but the pain didn’t subside. Only later would she learn that gallstones sometimes can fall into the common bile duct and cause a blockage of fluids, leading to pancreatic damage.

On Dec. 9, with severe pain in her back and abdomen, she woke her husband at 6:30 a.m. and told him they had to go to the hospital.

Soon they were in the emergency room at Central Iowa Healthcare in Marshalltown, where the staff realized Laura was right — something was wrong. Doctors performed an emergency C-section, and at 8:07 a.m. Josephine Teresa Adams was born.

Josie, at 6 pounds, 7 ounces, was healthy. But for Laura, that was the start of a monthslong ordeal of infections and surgeries, of recoveries and relapses.

Read more: Marshalltown woman has some successes after pregnancy complications

In the hours after her daughter was born, Laura seemed to be doing OK. That night, however, her heart rate increased and a fever developed. She was moved from the maternity ward to the intensive care unit, then transferred to Mary Greeley Medical Center in Ames.

There, a CT scan revealed acute necrosis of the pancreas — her pancreas was dying. She was airlifted to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City.

According to the National Pancreas Foundation, acute pancreatitis is responsible for one in every 200 hospital admissions in the United States annually but only occurs in one of every 10,000 pregnancies. In the majority of cases, acute pancreatitis can be treated with simple therapies — but in 15 percent of cases, it becomes serious.

Doctors at UIHC later told her husband that Laura’s was one of the most serious cases they had ever seen.

At first, the situation did not seem so dire. She spent three weeks in the hospital, battling infections and seeming to begin recovery before being transferred to Covenant Medical Center’s Acute Inpatient Rehabilitation Center in Waterloo to work her way back to full health.

It was the first time she would be discharged from UIHC on a path to recovery, but it would not be the last. Less than a day later, her condition deteriorated so rapidly she had to be taken by helicopter back to Iowa City, where she immediately was prepped for surgery.

How to help: Laura Adams’s GoFundMe account can be found here.

Doctors think her pancreas had ruptured, spilling infection into her lower colon, which in turn perforated, spreading the infection farther. Her abdomen was full of fecal matter, infected fluids and dead tissue.

She went into respiratory failure and was placed in a medically induced coma as machines kept her alive. Her legs had turned purple from lack of oxygen.

Her husband, Darin Adams, 30, was told she had a 50 percent chance of survival.

None of this was supposed to happen. An Army veteran who served in Iraq, he was the one used to fighting. Her job, as a music therapist at the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown, where they live, was to help others heal.