THE LIGHTER SIDE

After hospital sends Iowa woman home, she gives birth

There was no time to make it back to the hospital.

Cassy Abram, who was 37 weeks pregnant, and her husband, Scotty, had spent the night in a hospital in Iowa, but by the next morning, the physicians had concluded it was simply not time for her to deliver the baby, she said.

The couple, from Cedar Rapids, fought freezing cold temperatures and snow-covered roads to get back home. Minutes later, the baby was on the way.

Cassy told her husband to call for an ambulance, but before he could make the call, she had delivered their son on the living room floor. “It was crazy,” Cassy, 28, told the Washington Post.“I don’t know how else to explain it.”

It had been a joyous - albeit stressful - morning, but the Abrams said that when Cedar Rapids firefighters arrived, they made it even more special. While several of them tended to the mother and baby inside, two other responders shoveled snow from the couple’s driveway.

Cassy’s aunt, Larissa Ruffin, was on the phone for the birth.

It was about 6:30 a.m. when Cassy started to deliver and told her husband to get help.

He called Ruffin.

“He said, ‘Help me!’” Ruffin recalled, saying that she could hear Cassy screaming and crying in the background.“I told him, ‘Call 911!’ ”

Suddenly, Ruffin said, she heard him say,“Welcome to the world, baby boy,” and she heard the newborn cry.“I was so confused,” she said.

Just like that, Ruffin said, Scotty Abram Jr. had been born.