iPhone earphones saved our baby girl
Dad used cable to tie off newborn’s umbilical cord
WHEN Richard Cox had to deliver his premature baby daughter on the bathroom floor, he knew he would have to act quickly.
On making an emergency call to the Scottish Ambulance Service, he was told he would have to tie off the umbilical cord to guard mother and baby against infection.
But Mr Cox could find no string, nor even a shoelace, to carry out the vital task – so he grabbed the headphone cable from his Apple iPhone.
‘I’d passed my headphones three or four times as I searched around,’ said the 31-year-old mortgage adviser from Dunfermline, Fife. ‘I remember thinking “It’s going to have to be them”, because I couldn’t find anything else.’
The drama began when his wife Hayley, 32, began experiencing ‘intense’ pain that went on for 45 minutes. Not wanting to disturb their two-year-old son Liam as he slept, she went to the bathroom – and later cried out to her husband for help.
‘I think there is something primal in us that tells us what to do in those situations,’ he said once the emergency was past. ‘Or it could be all the Call the Midwife I watch with Hayley.
‘It was a perplexing 15 minutes. She asked, “Can you come to the bathroom?” – and within a few minutes, I had our baby in my hands.’
After their daughter Emilie was born at 1.25am, weighing just 3lb 14oz, Mr Cox called 999 and was
‘A good thing they weren’t cordless’
talked through the post-natal procedure – including the need to tie off the umbilical cord.
Looking back on the emergency delivery, he said: ‘As a mortgage adviser, I don’t have much midwifery training – but I play a lot of cricket and was thinking “soft hands, soft hands” to myself.’
When paramedics arrived at the family home shortly afterwards, they remarked how serene the scene was. Mr Cox said: ‘One of the guys said that out of all the homes where babies have been delivered, they have never been to one where it was so calm.’
Little Emilie was so small that she had to be sent to the Special Care Baby Unit in Kirkcaldy before being allowed home several weeks later.
Six months on from the birth, she is doing very well, while her proud father remains effusive in his appreciation of the work done by the paramedics. He said: ‘The ambulance service has an overwhelming job and they are all heroes. If we didn’t have the NHS, Emilie might not be here today.’
Five weeks after the emergency, Mr Cox found a roll of string he had overlooked in a drawer.
‘It’s always the way,’ he said. ‘I thought to myself, “Well, there you go, some string for next time.”
‘We still have the headphones. We’ve put them into a memory box for Emilie so we can say “That’s what we used to bring you into the world.” It’s a good thing I didn’t upgrade my phone and go for the cordless ones.’ Trillion dollar apple – Pages 8-9