By Don Jacobs
Knoxville News-Sentinel
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Kim Dettmering delivered her third child Monday about an hour after arriving for work.
It’s the second baby she has delivered by phone.
“I had a little girl both times,” the 33-year-old Rural/ Metro dispatcher and emergency medical technician said with a laugh.
Dettmering at 7:36 a.m. took an emergency call from a man saying his wife was having a baby.
“I asked him if he could see the baby’s head,” Dettmering said. “When he said yes, I told him, ‘You’re going to have to catch this baby when it comes out.’” As she spoke with the man, Dettmering learned this was the mother’s third child. For Dettmering, that meant a quick delivery.
“He was pretty calm,” Dettmering said of the husband on the other end. “When he delivered the baby, I think he was speaking from his cheek (on a cellphone) because it was hard to hear him during the delivery.
“Then I heard the baby crying. Babies will cry on their own.”
The healthy girl was born five minutes after the husband first reached Dettmering on the phone.
Dettmering knew a Rural/ Metro Ambulance crew and first responders with the Knoxville Fire Department were en route, so she didn’t have to bother the new father with details about the umbilical cord.
“I had him lay the baby on the bed between momma’s legs,” Dettmering said. The idea, she noted, was to keep the newborn level with the placenta until medical professionals arrived.
When Fire Department first responders arrived at 7:45 a.m., Dettmering hung up her end of the phone. Medical personnel at Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center were alerted to have warming blankets to meet the arriving newborn because of the morning temperatures.
“That’s like a perfect start to the day,” Dettmering said of the successful delivery.
Medical confidentiality prohibits Rural/Metro from identifying the new parents at the hospital.
Dettmering has been with Rural/Metro nearly seven years.
She has now helped deliver two babies by phone in the five years she has been dispatching medical services.
Her first dispatching delivery occurred April 20, 2010. That also involved a dad delivering the couple’s third child, delivered three minutes after the initial call for help.
She’s never had the opportunity to meet those parents or the little girl she helped usher into the world. But Dettmering’s first delivery is still the one she fawns about. That’s when her daughter, Alyssa, was born Oct. 3, 2007.
Dettmering and her firefighter husband had trouble conceiving. When they did, Dettmering was in her second year as an emergency medical technician on a Rural/ Metro ambulance.
Three months into her pregnancy, Dettmering decided to move from the ambulance to dispatching.
“I got kicked in the stomach and down a flight a steps at Walter P. Taylor, so I decided to come inside,” she said. “And I’m glad I did, because she’s the most precious thing I’ve ever seen,” she said of her daughter.
Copyright 2012 Knoxville News-Sentinel