Every expectant mother meticulously plans the moment their baby comes into the world, but even the most well thought out plans can go wrong.
Baby books warn you on the importance of a stress-free birth, so that your baby can be brought into the world as happily and healthily as possible. Thus moms around the world have every minute of their birth accounted for. But as we all know only too well, even the best-prepared plans are hard to follow, and when you throw in a baby, nurses, your own body and multiple other factors into the equation, it’s never going to work out quite as you’d envisioned.
Nobody knows this better than Jesica Hogan, from Kansas, who gave birth to a baby boy in a hospital corridor last July after arriving too late to make it to a bed.
It wasn’t that Jesica didn’t have a plan, or know what she was doing for she’d already had five children before Max arrived last summer. The problem arose when she began to experience contractions which lasted several days, without going into labor.
Jesica and her husband, Travis, had originally gone to the hospital once when the contractions began, but they eventually returned home when it became clear she wasn’t going into labor. For several days Jesica waited at home, but as the time began to drag she began to grow concerned.
“We decided we wanted to try to stick to our plan of an intervention free birth. So we chose to leave the hospital without any further progress and contractions that had begun to space out,” Jesica wrote on Little Leaping Photography’s blog. “We spent the following days gently encouraging the contractions, hoping to edge them on into labor.”
“I was losing faith in my ability to tell when I would actually be in labor, and losing faith that my body knew what it was doing,” she continued to write. “I vividly remember telling my husband, ‘I’m having contractions again, but I don’t think they’ll amount to anything’. I confided in him as we lay in bed that night that I was afraid I would either need to be induced, or that I wouldn’t know it was the real thing until it was too late and we were having a baby at home.”
The next morning, Jesica’s waters broke. “I felt my water break. I scurried off the edge of the bed, hurried to the bathroom in shock, and said ‘oh god, we’re not going to make it. We are going to have this baby at home’. The contraction went from uncomfortable to painful in a blink,” Jesica recalls.
“My husband assured me we would make it to the hospital. I cried that there was no way I could move, but he said he would get me to the car … In that time my contractions were on top of each other, I was certain things were moving fast. I wasn’t sure just how fast, but I knew we did not have long. When my husband returned he helped me to the dresser where I tossed on a pair of underwear and sweatpants.”
“He told me to make the phone calls I needed to make, to our birth photographer and to the hospital. And he kept me updated as he drove very quickly to the hospital. I texted Tammy, our amazing birth photographer, and let her know my water had broken and we were heading in. I told her I wasn’t sure we’d make it and she told me to take deep breaths and she was on her way.”
“Travis put his hazards on and made time I didn’t know we could make, while I labored intensely in the passenger seat. I could feel the baby moving down quickly with each contraction … I didn’t have time to time the contractions, but there had to have been less than a minute between them. I called labor and delivery and told them we were on our way, waters had ruptured, 6th baby and he was coming fast and I wasn’t sure we’d make it
“As we neared the last turn to the hospital I began screaming that baby was coming. He honked the horn rapidly as I screamed through the contractions and he pulled quickly into the ER drive. No one came out so he ran around to help me out of the car. I told him baby was almost there. I also said I couldn’t get out, I felt as if Baby was ready to emerge. That feeling made it nearly impossible to move.”
As she walked into the hospital, with the assistance of Travis and Tammy, who had by now arrived, Jesica felt her baby emerge. “I said something to the effect of, ‘oh god, he’s here’. I then started to take my pants off because I could feel my body pushing the baby’s head out,” Jesica remembers. “I reached down and could feel his head crowning with my hand. I looked at my husband and said, ‘Travis catch him!’ Without any hesitation, he did just that as I felt my body involuntarily pushing his head the rest of the way out.”
It was at that moment that Max joined the world, on the corridor floor of the Via Christi Hospital in Manhattan, Kansas at 3:38am. He was bruised from his ordeal, but healthy and happy and welcomed into the world by his loving parents, five sisters and lots of gobsmacked medical staff!
“It was my craziest birth, but also, the most perfect,” Jesica explained. “It was not at all what I had planned, but it ended without any intervention, with a healthy baby, and amazing support people by our sides. It was beautiful and I’ll forever love every memory of it.”
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