By Mara H. Gottfried
St. Paul Pioneer Press
ST. PAUL, Minn. — In the part of Darcy Burton’s baby book that asks who was present at her birth, her mother wrote, “Mom, Dad and 911 dispatcher.”
Last week, Lisa Burton told her infant daughter, “You have a special person to meet,” as they were introduced to the Ramsey County Emergency Communications Center fire dispatcher who helped deliver Darcy.
Burton’s labor happened too fast to get to the hospital. Her husband, Bob Burton, caught the baby as she was born in their St. Paul bathroom. On speakerphone was Allyson Gentry, the dispatcher.
“We just can’t thank you enough,” Lisa Burton told Gentry at their meeting, where they hugged and Gentry held baby Darcy. “Everybody always says to me, ‘Wasn’t it the scariest thing you’ve ever done?’ I say, ‘No it really wasn’t’ because we were so reassured by your voice and your calmness about the whole process.”
Darcy’s was the first delivery that Gentry assisted with, and her meeting with the Burton family marked the first time she’d had a chance to visit with someone she helped during her nearly nine years as a dispatcher.
In many cases, 911 call takers and dispatchers don’t find out the outcome of an incident, let alone come face to face with the people affected, the way police officers, firefighters and paramedics often do.
“In some ways, these folks can feel like unsung heroes,” said Scott Williams, director of Ramsey County emergency communications and oversees the ECC.
National Public Safety Telecommunications Week, which started Sunday, aims to raise awareness of the work of dispatchers and 911 call takers and celebrate their work. Some Ramsey County ECC workers have made videos to be posted on the Internet, talking about their jobs to give the public an idea about what they do.
Anyone who dials 911 in St. Paul or greater Ramsey County -- except in White Bear Lake, which has its own center -- is calling the ECC. The center dispatches all emergency calls. The 60 call takers and 60 dispatchers handle about 1 million calls a year.
“Part of the ... stress of the job is going from zero to 60,” Williams said. “You’ll take a call that is maybe a kid playing with a cell phone (and accidentally calling 911). Then you’ll hang up from that call and the next call is somebody who is in crisis, maybe whose life is in danger, who is in the process of being assaulted or worse.”
Gentry’s voice didn’t show the stress she felt during the Burtons’ Jan. 31 emergency call. The Burtons got an audio copy of the 911 call, and after hearing it, Lisa’s mom said, “I know that they’re trained to be calm, but she was so calm.”
Lisa’s water broke about 30 seconds after she woke at 3 a.m. that day.
She woke her husband, who got his watch to time her contractions.
“He said, ‘OK, tell me when to start,’ ” Lisa said. “I said, ‘Well, it’s going and it’s not stopping.’ Usually there’s a stop between these, but it’s just constant. I started feeling ill, and I went in to the bathroom again and I just yelled at him, ‘Call 911 because she’s coming!’ ”
Bob put the speakerphone on the counter of the “very, very tiny” bathroom of their house in St. Paul’s Payne-Phalen neighborhood. It was 3:13 a.m.
“All of a sudden, that’s when I saw Darcy’s head was out, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ ” Bob said. “I remember just being totally panicked and feeling all disheveled and everything, but when we heard it (on the 911 audio), it sounded calm.”
Gentry told Bob to get his wife, hunched in pain over the bathtub, onto the floor.
At 3:18 a.m., “Darcy just flew right out,” said Bob Burton, who caught her. She weighed 8 pounds 13 ounces.
Lisa Burton said one of her favorite parts of the tape is when her husband says, “She’s here, she’s here, she’s ...” and paused before saying, "... crying!” She said, “You hear this relief in his voice as he says it.”
Gentry, reading from cards at her console that help her walk callers through medical emergencies, told Bob Burton to wrap the baby in a towel, wipe her face and put her on Lisa to keep her warm.
The dispatcher also advised Bob to get something to tie off the umbilical cord. He suggested a zip tie -- he had plenty handy, just in case.
Another thing Lisa realized from listening to the tape was that Gentry asked more than once whether the umbilical cord was around the baby’s neck.
“We’re there seeing this and knowing what’s going on, but you’re having to hear our words and take that and figure out what is actually happening without seeing it,” she told Gentry. “That just really struck me with how difficult that must be when people are in a panic situation.”
St. Paul Fire Department Medic 9 arrived at 3:22 a.m.
Since the delivery, Bob has been known as “Dr. Bob” at school, Lisa said. Bob, 33, teaches eighth-grade language arts at Cottage Grove Middle School. Lisa, 35, previously an elementary school teacher, is studying for a doctoral degree in international development education at the University of Minnesota.
After the call, Gentry’s co-workers were excited. They’d heard her end of the conversation and knew a baby had been born, she said. They asked her the baby’s gender. “I said, ‘I forgot to ask. I don’t know,’ ” Gentry said.
The ECC gives stork pins to fire dispatchers who help deliver babies, Williams said. When Gentry got hers, it was pink, answering the gender question for her.
There were 21 prehospital births in St. Paul in 2010, but the numbers weren’t broken down to show how many babies were delivered by paramedics, St. Paul Fire Marshal Steve Zaccard said. The department estimates that paramedics deliver an average of five babies a year, he said.
In February, Lisa Burton sent a letter to the ECC, expressing her “deep gratitude” for the dispatcher who assisted in delivering “a healthy baby girl into the world in the most unexpected of ways. ... Her presence will be remembered in each retelling of the story.”
Lisa Burton included a photo of the family -- she and her husband, newborn Darcy and their 3 1/2-year-old son, Luke, who slept through his sister’s birth.
“I think too often these situations go unrecognized, and people take for granted that these services are available to us,” she said, explaining why she wrote the letter.
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