By Ann DeMatteo
The New Haven Register
NORTH HAVEN, Conn. — It was the day after the baby was due. Kelly Shanley was upstairs in her Quinnipiac Avenue home watching cartoons with her two children Wednesday night when she sneezed, and felt a pop.
“I didn’t think anything of it. I stood up and said, ‘Oh, wait. I think my water broke.’”
Kelly and her husband, Bill, called the obstetrician and were getting ready to go to the hospital when they thought it would be faster to go by ambulance, so they called 911, as well as someone to watch Colin, 3, and Amelia, 2.
“The contractions went from every five minutes to every two minutes to every one,” Kelly Shanley said. “I could kind of tell he’d be making his arrival pretty quick.”
In fact, little Aiden Patrick Shanley couldn’t wait for the American Medical Response ambulance to finish the drive to the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven. They made it as far as Exit 6 on Interstate 91, but no farther. The ambulance pulled to the side of the highway and Aiden made his arrival, assisted by the paramedics onboard.
Fire Chief Vincent Landisio on Friday afternoon presented town firefighter/paramedic Kevin Fox and AMR paramedic Jessica Flick with blue stork pins in honor of the arrival of Aiden, who is 8 pounds, 9 ounces. He also congratulated AMR driver Alex Ramirez for a job well done.
“In our business, to be able to welcome a life is very gratifying,” Landisio said.
Chuck Babson, AMR’s general manager, said AMR medics deliver three or four babies a year on average.
Sheets were hung in the ambulance so passing motorists couldn’t see inside.
Ramirez said he was concentrating on getting to the hospital safely and quickly, while trying to calm down Bill Shanley, who was in the passenger seat. He also had to figure out where to safely pull over when the paramedics told him the baby was being born at 8:26 p.m.
Fox said they didn’t have time to start an intravenous line, and just supplied oxygen.
“It was very, very quick. The head was showing, I got sterile gloves on and he was there,” Flick said, explaining that her classroom training flashed through her head as things unfolded.
Fox had delivered a baby in 1992 when he was a volunteer emergency medical technician in Pennsylvania. This delivery, he said, was “very matter of fact. I wanted to make sure the mother was taken care of and nothing was wrong with him. I got to cut the cord. I’m glad everything went well and there were no complications.”
The mother pushed three times and the baby arrived.
“I think they did a great job. Everybody was very professional. It was a surprise for everybody how quickly everything went,” Kelly Shanley said.
Bill Shanley said they wanted the baby’s birth certificate to say he was born on I-91, but authorities overrode him and wrote down St. Raphael’s.
“How many people could say they were born on I-91?” he asked.
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