Community mourns surgeon who died during labor

Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this report misidentified the state.

STARKVILLE, Miss. — A Mississippi community is mourning the loss of a beloved surgeon who died Wednesday during labor.

Nikki Shoemake, 40, died at OCH Regional Medical Center in Starkville, according to Oktibbeha County's coroner, Michael Hunt.

Hunt said Shoemake's body was sent to Pearl, Miss., for an autopsy. While Hunt declined to release a specific cause of death citing the incomplete autopsy, Beth Crisler Cook, a woman who identified herself as Shoemake’s friend in a Facebook post, said Shoemake died of a pulmonary embolism while in "natural labor."

Mississippi has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation, more than double the national average. Mississippi State Department of Health statistics show almost 40 maternal deaths per every 100,000 births in the state.

Shoemake joined the medical staff at Oktibbeha County Hospital in 2008 as a general surgeon, according to hospital spokeswoman Mary Kathryn Knight.

“The OCH family is very saddened with the loss of Dr. Nikki Shoemake,” the hospital's administrator and chief executive, Richard Hilton, said in a statement “Dr. Shoemake was an excellent surgeon who cared about her patients and was passionate about the practice of medicine. She had an impact on countless lives and will be greatly missed.”

Hunt said he considered Shoemake a personal friend and described her death as “tragic loss to the community.”

“It’s a loss for the people she would have treated. I can promise you that,” he said.

Shoemake received her undergraduate degree in microbiology from Mississippi State University in 1998 and her medical degree from the University of Mississippi School of Medicine in 2003.

She also completed the first two years of her general surgery residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center before completing her residency at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C., and at the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven, Conn.

Follow Sarah Fowler on Twitter: @FowlerSarah