AOL Health spoke with Andrea Benjamin, the 25-year-old mother of three, who lived through multiple gunshot wounds to the abdomen while pregnant with her son in May 2008.

AOL Health: What happened to you was pretty unbelievable, what do you remember of the experience itself?

Andrea Benjamin: I was seven and a half months pregnant, and I’d just moved back to Saint Paul, Minn. It was a bad neighborhood. That night I was at home [in my apartment] with my boyfriend and 10-month-old son, watching a movie. Somebody buzzed the door, and I wouldn’t open it. Suddenly, the person started shooting. I immediately called the police, but as I did that, I felt myself get shot. Over and over. I was crying to them, “I’ve been shot, I’ve been shot.”

I wound up on the ground, throwing up blood, and when I looked down, amniotic fluid was pouring out of the bullet hole [in my abdomen]. That’s when the labor started. My younger son was on the ground. I didn’t know if he’d been shot or not. When the police came to get me, all I remember saying was, “Save me, save my baby.”

AOL Health: Did you think you’d both make it?

AB: When I saw where the bullet hit, I was sure my baby was dead. From what I know about pregnancy, he should have been. But he’d flipped around in the womb, and that saved him. He had wounds in his thighs and rear, but none in his body. They put me under [anesthesia] the moment I got to the hospital. Waking up to find out he was alive, too, was just incredible.

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