Frank Juliano
Connecticut Post
SEYMOUR, Conn. — A woman feels a little ill. Not knowing why she’s queasy or has excruciating stomach pains, she calls for an ambulance.
Shortly after it arrives, she gives birth -- to a baby she never knew she was pregnant with.
It sounds like a scene out of reality TV show, but, for Jennifer Scollin it was just plain reality.
Scollin, who lives in Seymour gave birth to her second child early Saturday morning in an ambulance while it was parked in her driveway.
That morning, she knew something was wrong, but “I didn’t know I was pregnant,” Scollin said in a phone interview from her room at Griffin Hospital in Derby on Monday morning.
Scollin and her boyfriend, Matt Dillman, have a 4-year-old daughter, Kelsey, so Scollin knows what it’s like to be pregnant. But, she said, not all the signs were there this time around.
“I had been feeling fine until the past few days, and I had been getting my `womanly thing’ every month until last month,” she said.
Scollin said she thought she’d caught a “stomach bug” that was going around -- but she didn’t attribute it to a baby.
Then, on Saturday morning, she woke up with sharp stomach pains and called Dillman home from his nearby job.
“I thought I was just stressed out at work, and I was planning to call my doctor for an appointment, but as it turned out there wasn’t time,” Scollin said.
Scollin’s water broke moments after Dillman returned home, and he called 911 when the couple realized they were having their second child.
“He was going to drive me to the hospital, but we had no chance to do that,” Scollin said. “We didn’t know at first it was a baby coming, but once we did, it happened fast.”
The ambulance crew asked Scollin if she could walk to their vehicle, and she barely made it.
“Two pushes and he was out,” she said.
She delivered a son, whom the couple named Cole Michael Thomas Dillman. Both mom and son are doing fine and were discharged from Griffin Hospital at midday Monday.
Hospital staff wouldn’t speak at length about the 9-pound-3-ounce surprise Scollin delivered, but Luanne Miller, director of Griffin’s Childbirth Center, said in an email that the Griffin team took the odd birth in stride.
“This sort of situation is uncommon, but we are always prepared for anything,” she said.
The woman’s parents, Tom and Joanne Scollin, live nearby and Dillman called them on his way home, at 4:45 a.m.
“We arrived minutes after the birth,” Tom Scollin said in an email. “I was alarmed, shocked to be told by my granddaughter that her mom had a baby boy. I looked in the ambulance, and both were in excellent shape. My daughter said, ‘Dad, I didn’t know’.”