“She was being born in my shorts” – Mum gives birth standing beside highway

Posted in Birth.
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We’ve read some pretty amazing on-the-road birth stories. There are babies born in front seats and babies born in back seats … but this baby born ON the road is a first, even for us!

False labour?

US mum Theresa Cissell experienced this roadside arrival when she gave birth to her fourth child, a little girl named Leonora Rae.

The Kentucky mum delivered her little one en route to the hospital in a very surprising, scary and slippery way.

Theresa went into labour at home, and she and hubby Chad piled into the car and headed for their hospital. She’d had two experiences of false labour before, and on arrival hospital staff told the couple it wasn’t time and that they should head back home.

Theresa knew that she was in labour, but because they wouldn’t admit her, she returned home to worry about what would happen next. What happened next was that her waters broke.

“Things took a turn for the worse,” Theresa told The Kentucky Standard. “I started to have really strong contractions.”

“She’s coming!”

So back into the car they hopped, heading for a different, closer hospital in the hopes that they would be admitted.

En route Theresa quickly realised that this baby was not willing to wait.

“I’m in labour in the car, and I start saying ‘she’s coming!’” she told WDRB News.

Chat pulled over in a frantic quest to offer assistance to his wife and incoming bub, also calling 911 for some expert advice.

“He pulls over on the side of the road, and he tries to get me to the back to lay me down so he can help direct the baby coming,” Theresa explains. “I don’t make it to the back!”

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“She was being born in my shorts”

As Theresa got out of the passenger seat and prepared to move to the back seat, her baby arrived – just 20 minutes after she went into labour.

“She was being born in my shorts,” Theresa recalls, “and then as she’s coming into my shorts, I’m reaching down trying to capture her.”

Chad heroically leaned in and helped catch the little one before she fell onto the roadside gravel.

“Newborn babies are pretty slippery I’ve come to find out!” Theresa laughed.

Touch and go

At the time it was not a laughing matter at all, however. Baby Leonora was purple, silent and tangled in the umbilical cord, which was wrapped twice around her neck.

Chad quickly removed the cord and smacked his baby on the bottom. She began to cry immediately. 

“He was just Mr. Calm. He knew exactly what to do,” Theresa said.

The family were just under a kilometre from the hospital at this point, so they piled into the car and headed in.

“Hearing her cry was definitely a sigh of relief,” Theresa admits. “We definitely had some guardian angels watching over us that night, for sure.”

Theresa and Chad Cissell often joked about having a home birth, but they got more than they bargained for when Theresa…

Posted by The Kentucky Standard on Saturday, 31 August 2019

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