A harrowing arrival, a happy ending
Baby’s breech delivery at roadside ‘scariest day of my life,’ dad says
Ayden Connor Rorke is truly a miracle baby.
His parents knew his birth would be risky — Ayden was breech and his mother was scheduled for a C-section — but they didn’t expect to be delivering him on the side of a road, with no heartbeat and the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck.
“It was the scariest day of my life,” said dad Ryan Rorke, 33.
Today, Ayden is a happy, healthy baby boy adjusting to life at home in Alcona, near Barrie — but his dad can’t stop thinking about their terrifying Christmas Eve ordeal.
The day had started off with excitement at 5 a.m. when Ryan’s wife, Sarah, realized her water had broken.
She woke Ryan up, took a shower and got ready to leave for the hospital. The in-laws arrived to take care of the couple’s 4-year-old son Lyam, and by 5:50 a.m. the two were en route to Barrie’s Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre to welcome their Christmas baby.
But suddenly, Sarah’s contractions began coming quickly and close together.
Ten minutes into their foggy drive on Highway 400, she turned to her husband and said, “You have to pull over. He’s coming,” Ryan told the Star.
Ryan called 911, turned at the Dunlop St. exit in Barrie and parked on the side of the road near a Tim Hortons.
Within moments, he was petrified. “At that point I could see Ayden’s two feet sticking out of her,” he said. “Not only two feet, but two feet that were purple.”
The 911 operator told his wife not to push.
“Please help me, please help me,” Ryan pleaded.
Nearby, paramedics just off the night shift received a call about an “imminent delivery,” Simcoe County paramedic platoon supervisor Craig Hassberger told the Star.
Within minutes, three ambulances and seven paramedics had rushed to the scene, finding Sarah upset and in pain and Ryan trying to keep her calm.
Ryan got into the back seat of the minivan and held his wife’s head and shoulders as she fitted her legs out the open door.
“I got right in there with them,” Hassberger said.
“We had a little bit of a struggle to finally deliver baby Rorke, and once he did come out (at 6:15 a.m.) . . . there was no heart rate, no breathing. So that changes things obviously very quickly.”
The team removed the umbilical cord from around the baby’s neck and Hassberger rushed Ayden — who was purple — to an ambulance, where the paramedic team initiated chest compressions and used a bag valve mask for resuscitation.
For seven long, agonizing minutes, baby Ayden did not breathe.
“It felt like an eternity,” Hassberger said.
Meanwhile, Ayden’s worried parents were asking, “Is my baby OK? Is my baby breathing?”
Hassberger said the team had to be honest; they told them their baby was not alive.
“I wouldn’t wish that on any-
“If it wasn’t for them . . . I think this story would be drastically different.” RYAN RORKE AYDEN’S DAD
one,” said Ryan.
Finally, when Ayden made some grunting noises and attempts to breathe, Hassberger told Ryan the good news. But still, no one would say the baby was fine.
Alone in the family’s silver Dodge Caravan, following two ambulances carrying his wife and newborn baby to the hospital, Ryan said a thousand thoughts raced through his mind.
“I’m driving to the hospital not knowing what I’m going to hear,” he said.
“And then knowing that if I get to the hospital and things aren’t OK, I have to then go find my wife and tell her what’s happened.”
It wasn’t until hours later, after Ayden was in the hospital’s intensive care unit, that someone finally said the baby was healthy and isn’t to have any long-term problems.
“It was definitely a rollercoaster of emotion,” Ryan said. “Both of us (are) happy — we have a new son who’s OK, but then you think back to how bad it could have gone.”
Sarah, a teacher, finds it difficult to talk about the ordeal. Ryan is still in shock and calls the birth “traumatic” but said the family is trying to move on.
“I’m sure that they went through a range of emotions,” said Hassberger, who said he’s only heard of one roadside delivery for Simcoe County in the past few years. “For babies to be delivered in the field with complications . . . (they) generally don’t have a great success rate. But we obviously had a successful one here.”
In the days following Ayden’s Dec. 24 birth, the paramedics involved stopped by the hospital to check in on the family.
Ryan said the family can’t thank them — or hospital staff — enough.
“If it wasn’t for them . . . I think this story would be drastically different,” he said. “Because of them, we have a second son.”