Today, I delivered (over the phone) my fourth baby! My first, in a pub toilet, was quite dramatic but the other two were fairly anticlimactic and just consisted of someone shouting “Ambulance quick! The baby is coming NOW!” and then me shouting instructions into an abyss of people panicking and not listening while the baby delivered itself the way nature intended. This time, however, I really felt like I was helping and playing an active part in the baby’s birth.

The call came in around 10am and was made by the baby’s father. The mother was nineteen and it was her first baby, and I guess she thought labour was going to take a lot longer than it did. This makes a change; a lot of first time mothers dial for a “maternataxi” as soon as they miss a period. Still, there was no time to discuss why they weren’t at the hospital yet, as the baby was well on its way. The father-to-be reported that there was “some kind of THING!” appearing “down below” and howled that he needed an ambulance really quickly.

“Sorry, mate,” I said, “but it looks like we’re going to have to deliver this baby now. The ambulance is coming but I doubt it’ll make it in time.”

“But I don’t know what I’m doing! I’ll have to cut the cord and stuff and I don’t know how!!” wailed the man “Please, make them hurry! I need an ambulance”

“Forget the ambulance! And certainly forget cutting the cord! All you need to do is help her get the baby out,” I instructed. “Now do as I say! Are you ready?”

All the maternity instructions are built into the AMPDS software, which is fortunate, as BBAs (Born Before Arrivals) are fairly rare and we don’t get much practice! I brought up the screen and skipped the bit about getting towels and cushions and blankets — there was no time for that.

“With each contraction, place the palm of your hand against the baby’s head,” I read. “As the baby delivers, support its head and shoulder. Remember it will be slippery, do not drop it!”

The father relayed these instructions to the patient’s mother (the baby’s grandmother!) who was also in the room.

“Where is she supposed to put her hand again?”

“Against the baby’s head. I mean, against that thing…”

The mother-to-be screamed in the background.

“Oh my god!” said the father. “I think she’s in serious trouble! I think she’s dying! She’s in so much pain, and there’s blood, and this white stuff, and water and it’s all gone like, oh my god!! HELP! Send the ambulance!!!”

It took me a good couple of minutes to persuade him that nothing was actually going wrong and that this was all normal. With the next contraction, he got it together, and encouraged the mother to “puuuush!” and take deep breaths and do all those things that happen when people give birth on TV. After this contraction, the whole of the head was out.

“Oh my god!” said the father. “It’s the baby’s head!” I think that, up until this point, he had seen the protrusions from his girlfriend’s vagina as something totally alien and forgotten the fact that she was having a baby at all. I was just relieved that it hadn’t been a foot — breech births are far more dangerous and not something that should be dealt with over the phone.

A slight problem then occurred in that, after three more contractions, no more of the baby emerged. It was time to change tack.

“Get the mother sitting on a cushion,” I told him “and tell her to grab her legs and pull them over her shoulders. Then, with the next contraction, tell her to push really hard.”

(There’s an obvious joke here that I’m not going to make…)

The mother did as she was told. Childbirth is indeed not a dignified process. There was a ear-splitting scream, and then a lot of crying. It was hard to pick out the sound of the baby crying, because the father was crying, the mother was crying, and so was the grandmother. I was the only person not crying.

“Is the baby breathing?” I asked, crossing my fingers.

“Yes, it’s crying!” said the father. There was then a short break whilst everyone was sighing and gasping and saying things like “oh my god” and “I can’t believe it”.

“Right,” I said. “Clean the baby’s mouth and nose, wrap it up and give it to the mother. What have you got, a boy or a girl?”

There was a pause while he had a look. Then he came back to the phone. “Um, I can’t tell!”

Kind of worrying that someone who can make a baby doesn’t know the fundamentals of reproductive anatomy!

The ambulance arrived shortly after that — the whole thing had happened in less than five minutes. Mother and baby were well, and were taken to hospital to be checked over. The sex of the baby remains a mystery.

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