Having a Baby in My Car?

My British friend, Sue Walker, was very pregnant.  Her husband worked in Paris and it usually took him some time to get home.  

One afternoon Sue called to tell me I was on yellow alert.  She wasn’t sure her husband would get home on time to get her to the hospital and was needing me as a back up. A couple of hours later, the call was to put me on orange alert and, not much later, it was upped to red.  I rushed over to find her in transition. She had to waddle down a very long set of stairs to get to the car and I was personally worried she wouldn’t even make it.  But she got into the back seat and lay down.

I was in a rush. I didn’t want the baby to be born in the car; it would be so uncomfortable for her.  So I had the accelerator to the floor to the pleas of Sue to ‘Slow down Chris..’  She had visions of the front page of the newspaper announcing the accident with mother and baby. So I’d slow down for a few blocks and then gun it to the cries of “She’s coming!”  Oh gahd, please not yet!

When we got to the hospital, the baby was starting to see the light of day.  I ran in and completely forgot all my french.  I yelled up and down the empty hallways, “Au secour, au secour” That means ‘help’.  A hulking black orderly ran up with a gurney and out to the car.  Sue, who was in the middle of delivering, looked up to see this beast on top of her telling her to hang on.  

She barely made it. Her husband missed the whole show of the arrival of a beautiful baby girl, Sofie. That was a day to remember.