New Parents Praise Whitfield 911, Emergency Responders For Helping With Their Daughter's Birth At Home On Utility Road

  • Monday, July 20, 2015
  • Mitch Talley

“Whitfield County 911.”
“Yes, my wife is in labor, and she won’t be able to make it to the hospital.”
Those simple words might sometimes have been cause for panic, but last month they were just the beginning of  a heroic night of cooperation and teamwork between a pregnant woman, her husband, a 911 telecommunicator, three firefighters, and two EMTs that resulted in the birth of a beautiful little girl named Kennedy.
When Megan Rewis went to bed at her Utility Road home in Whitfield County that Thursday night, June 26, she didn’t realize what an impact she would have on Whitfield County emergency workers in just a few hours - and vice versa.
She had been having contractions for two days – the false alarm Braxton Hicks kind – and had gone to see her doctor on Wednesday and Thursday for routine checkups.
With a due date of June 28, Megan and her husband, Justin, knew that it probably wouldn’t be long before they would have a new baby to join their 2-year-old son, Tucker.
“This wasn’t our first rodeo so we kinda knew the basics of what was going on,” Megan said.

“I was further along in my pregnancy than I was when I had my son, so we knew that it was coming sometime soon.”
Even when she lost her mucus plug (the first sign of labor) after she got home from the doctor’s office that Thursday,  Megan still didn’t expect to be the center of a heart-warming story that night.
“After I lost my mucus plug, nothing happened at all,” Megan recalled, “no more contractions than I had been  having. We actually went and got something to eat, went and hung out with his grandparents that evening, and then came back home and got Tucker ready for bed.”
While everyone else went to sleep, though, Megan stayed awake, her maternal instinct kicking in to let her know something big was about to happen.
“At 1 o’clock in the morning, I had my first real contraction,” she said. “I have a pretty high pain tolerance, so I just kinda did it by myself for about 45 minutes, and then the contractions started getting bad, really bad, and coming together really quickly.”
She woke up Justin at 1:45 a.m. and asked him to bring her the birthing ball, a large rubber ball which provides a firm, yet soft place to sit and also forces good posture, allowing for decreased straining of mom-to-be’s muscles.
“I asked Justin to draw me a hot bath about 2 o’clock,” Megan said. “I got into the bathtub and was just relaxing, laying on my side. He started to make phone calls about 2:15 when he called the babysitter to come on to the house so that we could leave to go to the hospital.”
Justin then called his mother-in-law about 2:20 and told her to head to the hospital, where he and Megan would be arriving shortly after the babysitter got there to look after Tucker.
Or so they thought.
Megan had intentionally labored at home with their first child, waiting until the last minute to go to the hospital for the actual birth.
“Justin asked me if I remembered what I felt like physically when we left to go to the hospital with our first baby,” Megan said, “and I told him that I didn’t know what it felt like and I also told him that I couldn’t control the pain that I was in, couldn’t get it under control.”
At 2:23, Justin made his last phone call, this time to Megan’s best friend to tell her to drive to the hospital, too.
“As soon as he hung up,” Megan said, “I yelled at him and told him that I needed to bear down. He’s like, ‘No, no, it’s not time. You’ve just gotten started, everything’s OK,’ and I said, ‘No, I need to,’ and then my water broke! He tried to get me up out of the tub, but I said, ‘We can’t go anywhere because there’s nobody here to watch Tucker.”
Seconds later, she told Justin she needed to push, and that’s when she reached down and felt the baby crowning.
Justin knew there was no time to make it to the hospital, so he called 911 and put his phone on speaker mode.
That’s when Kelly Azbill – who has been working 2½ years at the 911 Center – put her training to good use, referring quickly to the card set, a nationally standardized set of instructions that guide telecommunicators on how to help callers with a wide range of emergencies, including childbirth.
The following conversation comes from the actual tape of the call.
After getting the address of the Rewis home, Azbill tells Justin to move over to his wife real quick.
“I’m right here at her,” Justin says, as his wife screams in pain in the background.
“How many weeks or months is she?”
“Her due date is the 28th,” Justin answers, a long scream from Megan interrupting their conversation.
“She’s nine months pregnant?”
“The baby’s coming out right now,” he says calmly, another long scream audible in the background.
“The baby’s coming out? OK,  hold on one second. Let me go ahead and get help started your way.”
***
That help would arrive first in the form of volunteer firefighter Samantha Splawn, who had been awakened at her home by the sound of her pager going off about 2:30 a.m. and then raced to cover the short two to three minutes to the nearby Rewis home.
In the meantime, Azbill continues  to offer instructions to Justin.
“As the baby delivers, I want you to support the baby’s head and shoulders and hold its hips and legs firmly. OK? Remember that the baby’ll be slippery and don’t drop it.”
Suddenly Megan screams in the background: “She’s out, she’s out! Oh, my God!”
“Is the cord wrapped around her neck?” Azbill asks.
“No, it is not,” Justin says calmly.
“OK. Is she breathing?”
“Yes, she is.”
“She’s breathing? OK, perfect. I need you to get some towels, and I need you to gently wipe off the baby’s mouth and nose.”
“OK.”
At that point, little Kennedy can be  heard crying for the first time, a sound that’s sure to stir the emotions of any parents listening to the tape.
“Sir, are you OK?” a concerned Azbill asks.
“Yes.”
“Did you get some towels?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is the baby breathing fine?”
“She is breathing fine.”
“OK! Congratulations!”
“Thank you.”
***
Shortly after, Splawn arrives at the house, leaving her car’s emergency flashers on to alert fellow responders still on their way to the correct location.
“The door was cracked, so I was hoping I had the right house,” Splawn said with a laugh, recounting the experience. “When I opened the door, I could hear the baby crying. I was very relieved at that point because hearing cries is like the best thing you could hear. I headed back there, and the mom was holding the baby at that point but was still having contractions because she still had to pass the afterbirth.”
Splawn says she wrapped up the baby, made sure she was breathing well, and then waited on Lt. Kent Cochran and firefighter David Freiberg to arrive in their fire truck from Station 9.
Justin had already tied off his daughter’s umbilical cord, as instructed by Azbill, and the firefighters were in the process of clamping off the cord when Whitfield EMS paramedics Aaron Gaddis and Adam Freeman also arrived to finish the job and assess the condition of  the mother and baby.
“At that point, the little boy was in there with the dad,” Splawn said. “Mom was still having contractions, so she still was in a lot of pain. I made sure that Kennedy was wrapped up good and gave her to her dad, then I took the little boy and asked him if he would come with me. We went to his room and checked it out and then went outside and looked at the fire truck to kinda get him out of the room since his mom was still in pain. I just wanted to keep him calm in the middle of chaos.”
Like all of the emergency responders, Splawn was instantly smitten with the little girl, calling her “absolutely adorable,” “gorgeous,” and “perfect.”
While Splawn is a mother herself, she says she had never worked a delivery as an emergency responder. “It’s different when you’re helping somebody else,” she said. “This was my first delivery, though we didn’t technically deliver the baby. Her mom and dad did that!”
Cases like this are “absolutely” why she decided to volunteer for the fire department.
“We don’t get very many happy calls,” Splawn said, “so even though it was 2:30 in the morning, I was just grinning from ear to ear for the rest of the night. It was probably 5 o’clock before I could go back to sleep. It was just such a happy moment. I was happy for them; I was happy the baby was healthy.  It was nice to be able to help someone with an awesome outcome and it be a happy moment.”
***
Lt. Cochran was literally a child himself when he first entered the fire service as a 14-year-old member of the Explorers group affiliated with the fire department.  He became a volunteer four years later and has been a full-time firefighter since 1997.
Despite his veteran  status, Cochran says other than being there for the arrival of his own daughter, this was his first time helping with a birth. He downplayed his role, saying “there really wasn’t anything to do. Mom had already had the baby, and 911 had already told them to tie the cord off, so we were basically just there for care and comfort. Our job was done before we even got there.”
Cochran praised Splawn for her efforts. “Samantha played a pivotal role, her being the lady in the bunch,” he said. “She was there ahead of the fire engine and did all the heavy lifting. Well, Mom did the heavy lifting, and Samantha did the rest. The rock stars and the heroes would be Mom and Samantha. We’re just glad everything turned out right. We usually see people at their very worst, so on this call, it was good to see life at its very best.”
Paramedic Freeman says in his seven or eight years in emergency services, he had never been part of a childbirth.
“When we showed up, the fire department had already done a wonderful job of stimulating the baby, and they already had her dried off and warm and covered up,” Freeman said. “Essentially the only thing for EMS to do at the time was to take care of mother and baby.  We had to finish cutting the umbilical cord, and then we let Dad hold the baby. Then we took care of Mom until we got them both on the stretcher and loaded up in the back of the ambulance.”
Freeman says the adrenaline was definitely flowing on this call.
“At 2:15, 2:30 in the morning when the call came in, it’s something that will get your heart going a little bit more,” he said, “especially when you’ve not had that kind of experience before. All the different things run through your mind of what we need to do once we get there to take the best care possible of mother and baby.”
Just as the telecommunicators at 911 are trained to help with childbirths, the paramedics are trained on how to actually deliver babies in the field – “it’s just something that doesn’t happen that often,” Freeman said.
***
The new parents and several family members – including little Tucker and his new baby sister Kennedy -  came out to the 911 Center on July 6 to thank the emergency responders for the job they did.
“The phone call that night is a big blur to me,” Megan admitted. “I don’t remember much, other than hearing Kelly being so encouraging. I remember her saying you’re doing a great job, everything’s fine, help is on the way, you guys just stay calm, everything’s going to be okay.”
That kind of compassion came from everyone who responded to their home that night – via phone or in person, the couple says.
“Our entire experience with everybody was really great,” Megan said. “I felt respected by what was going on. We never felt like we had done anything wrong, but it really was an accidental situation. Everybody who was on the scene was also very respectful of modesty and did everything they could to be respectful of the situation. You know, I’m laying there unclothed obviously, and I felt like they really went above and beyond to respect that. Anytime anything had to be checked, they were asking permission and making sure that I was comfortable as I could be under the circumstances.”
Looking back at the birth, Justin says the biggest factor for him was just staying calm.
“I just knew that when the time came,  you gotta do what you gotta do,” said Justin, who is in the Army National Guard in Dalton. “I kinda put it to Megan as being on a mission somewhere; when the time comes, you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Megan says  the birth itself was fleeting. “I couldn’t believe it had happened so fast,” she said. “It was a whirlwind situation. When we had our first, I labored for 17 hours at home before we went to the hospital and then we were under professional care there.  It‘s a scary situation because you’re going through it for the first time, but you are surrounded by medical professionals and so that takes the scariness out of it as far as life or death.”
But when little Kennedy started coming last month, “it was like something you’d see on  TV,” Megan said. “It was really kind of an out-of-body experience.  I was impressed with my body, that my body did what it needed to do naturally. And Justin transformed into something I’d never seen before and believed in me and was encouraging and not scared and the hero of this situation to me.”
She also praised Azbill for her encouragement from the beginning. “Listening to the operator,” Megan said, “I really felt encouraged by what she said and what she was telling us and to stay calm and everything was going to be all right.”
Justin says in the end, he believes the at-home experience was a “blessing.”
“It’s not something you expect to ever happen,” he said. “With our other son, we did wait until the last minute to get to the hospital, but we pretty much knew we were going to make it there before he was born. It really wasn’t that big of a deal. This time, it just happened so quick, it was a blessing, like it was supposed to happen to us, and God put the right people there to take care of us.”
Big brother Tucker also came through the experience in good shape.
“He was a little bit scared at first because when he first woke up, he woke up to me yelling,” Megan said. “So that startled him. But our first responder Samantha  came to the rescue and asked him if he wanted to go outside and see the fire truck. So for the next three days, he was telling everybody that Mommy went to the hospital in a fire truck! So he’s really impressed with that, and of course, where the baby’s concerned, he’s excited that she’s not in mommy’s belly anymore.”
Whitfield 911 Deputy Director Ashlee Zahn says she is proud of her staff. “They’re professionals, we’ve trained them, and they performed to their job,” she said. “It’s normal to give instructions, whether it’s for CPR, basic first aid, or childbirth. It all starts in the 911 Center with the coordination and communication to the emergency responders to handle the situation until they arrive on the scene. 911 really is the first, first responder. They handle patient care the first few minutes while everybody else is responding.”
Still, 911 telecommunicators are not machines, and it’s their compassion that makes them so good at their jobs.
“It was absolutely the most exciting call I’ve ever had,” Azbill said. “I got up after the call (which lasted just 12 minutes, with the baby actually arriving in the first two minutes), and as soon as I hung up the phone, I just started crying. It was like so much joy to help somebody bring a little miracle into the world. It was amazing. I loved it.
“I was like, ‘I want to do it again!’ ” she said with a laugh.

To hear audio of the 911 call, click here to download.


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