Woman delivers nephew in hospital car park
IT FELT LIKE THEY WERE TRYING TO FOB ME OFF, AS IF THEY WERE SAYING ‘DON’T BE SILLY, YOU’RE NOT IN LABOUR’
A woman was forced to deliver her nephew in a hospital car park and then give him the kiss of life after doctors sent his mother home prematurely.
First-time mother Kirsty Brook, 30, had been to hospital on November 13 fearing she was in labour, even though her baby wasn’t due for another five weeks.
But staff told her she simply had a urine infection and sent her home at 2pm that day.
By 8pm it was clear Ms Brooke was indeed in labour, so her sister, Michelle Brook-Lomas, drove her to hospital.
However baby Harry was in such a rush to enter the world that she was forced to deliver him outside the entrance of Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax, West Yorkshire.
And moments after delivering the little boy, she realised he wasn’t breathing.
Quick-thinking Ms Brook-Lomas, a former childminder, wiped the mucus from her tiny nephew’s mouth and gave him the kiss of life. Seconds later he began to cry.
Medics rushed baby Harry into the hospital to check him over before reuniting him with his mother and father Mark.
Baby Harry, who weighed 6st 3lb, was kept in hospital for five days and spent the first 24 hours in an incubator with oxygen and a heat lamp.
Ms Brook, of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, has now hit out at her treatment, saying the outcome could have been very different if it wasn’t for her sister.
She said: ‘I feel disgruntled about it. I was a first-time mum, I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know the difference between contractions and a water infection.
‘It felt like they were trying to fob me off, as if they were saying ‘don’t be silly, you’re not in labour’.
‘It was surreal, like it was happening to someone else. I just wanted to get to the hospital. ‘Thankfully Michelle was there or else Harry may not have been here today. She was brilliant.’
Full-time mother-of-three Ms BrookLomas, 34, who used her baby first-aid training from her former job as a childminder, said: ‘I had asked Kirsty a few times if she wanted me to pull over as we drove to hospital but she said “‘just get me there”.
‘As we were approaching the hospital she said she wanted to push and when I saw the car park, I just did a handbrake turn across four spaces near the entrance, jumped out and Mark raced into get the midwife.
‘Kirsty was in the back seat and I talked her through it. It all happened within minutes.
‘When the baby arrived he had mucus in his mouth so I wiped it out. He wasn’t breathing so I gave him the kiss of life, then he started crying and I gave him to Kirsty to do skinto-skin.
‘The medics came and the umbilical cord was cut before he was taken inside.’
Ms Brook said: ‘I was overjoyed when Harry started to cry. We all were. It wasn’t the birth I was expecting.