Squeamish dad delivers baby by side of road

Seamus Enright

 

“I’m afraid now, you’re going to have to deliver the baby,” John O’Driscoll was told over the phone by a midwife in the early hours of the morning last Thursday somewhere on the road between Kingscourt and Bailieboro.

The Cork carpenter, renowned for his squeamish disposition to the sight of blood, had been on his way to Cavan General Hospital with his wife Olwyn who was in labour. But now, he was on his own.

Speaking to The Anglo-Celt, John, a native of Bandon, Co Cork, who lives with his wife Olwyn on the Rocks Road, Kingscourt, described the moment he saw the head of his newborn daughter emerge during birth in the back of the family BMW as both “one of the most wonderful, but scariest moments of my life”.

The situation prior to baby Anna’s unique arrival arose in the early hours of last Thursday morning, September 4. “At around 2am, Olwyn started getting cramps with maybe five minutes between them. Before we knew it, they started to get more frequent and it was at this stage that Olwyn said maybe it’s time to go to the hospital,” recounted John.

It was while driving into Kingscourt town that John recalls his wife announcing those few fateful words: “I don’t think we’re going to make it to the hospital on time.”

“'We haven’t got time. This baby is coming and its coming now,’ she said to me. I just kept going 'you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine’, trying not to take any notice, keep us on the road, and at the same time hoping she was just getting carried away with it all,” he recalled.

But with another prompt from Olwyn, the realisation of what John was about to face began to sink in.

“'This is it,’ she said. I asked her 'are you sure?’ and she said 'yes’... We were about halfway between Kingscourt and Bailieborough (Lisball) when we pulled in.”

Olwyn, who had been on the phone to a nurse in the maternity unit at Cavan General Hospital, handed control over to John, who was told an ambulance had been dispatched but was up to 20 minutes away.

To add to the drama, in all the excitement John kept dropping the phone, while further difficulty came with the device falling in and out of mobile coverage.

“When I got back onto to her she (Laura) said to me, 'I’m afraid now you’re going to have to deliver the baby’. To hear those words... I don’t know. I started feeling a bit faint. We were out in the complete pitch dark, there was no one around us for miles, parked at the side of the road. I knew, no matter what, I had to do what was needed to be done.”

Following the nurse’s instructions, John placed Olwyn into the back seat of the car.

“At this stage she was in severe pain. Olwyn was distressed and I was pacing back and forth outside the car trying to build up courage and say to myself 'alright, I can do this’. I was trying to look calm in front of her but, at the same time, she knows me well and could see I was freaking out. The nurse was great, she did her best stopping me from losing the head altogether.

“I’d be the type of fellow who wouldn’t be good in a situation like that at all. Delivering a baby is the last thing I’d have ever thought would happen to me. All of a sudden I was stuck right in the middle of it. It was unbelievable.”

John tells the Celt that pure adrenaline alone kept him from falling over and do all that could be done given the surprise circumstances.

“To cut a long story short” as John put it, at 2.20am baby Anna was born weighing 7lbs, 4oz, with her proud father taking her in his arms, wrapping her in a cardigan before placing his newborn daughter on Olwyn’s chest for extra warmth and comfort.

Gardaí from Bailieborough arrived on the scene soon after, shortly followed by not one, but two ambulances, the first from Virginia and the second from Cavan General.

“The crews were excellent, and the gardaí were very helpful too,” John says.

The happy couple, John and Olwyn, are now back at home in Kingscourt with their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Eva and the new arrival Anna.

A carpenter by trade, John laughs at the irony of his phobia to sickly situations, especially when people draw comparisons to him cutting his finger or banging his thumb during work.

“Aw stop! It’s a completely different situation all together. There is absolutely no comparison.”

Olywn adds that a week before the remarkable birth of their daughter, her husband “wouldn’t have even looked at a bloody knee”.

John, and Olwyn, a native of Kingscourt, returned to Ireland from America where they met some years back, to live and raise a family in the locality. She says apart from the “terrifying” fear of what was happening, and the “worry” that John might collapse at any minute, she is impressed with how her husband managed to “step up to the mark”.

“I couldn’t have done it with out him”, she says of her husband, adding that mother and baby are doing well.

John now says the couple now have a memorable story to tell their new daughter as she grows older.

“This will definitely be one of those stories that she’ll probably hear about for the rest of her life. There’s not many people nowadays born out on the side of a road, miles away from anything.

“It’s the talk of Kingscourt at the moment. It’s after getting all over the town, which is hilarious. They’re all amazed at how it happened, especially with the fact that I’m so squeamish when it comes to stuff like that,” said John.