A doctor has delivered a healthy newborn baby on board an international trans-Atlantic flight from Paris to New York.
Never mind Kimye’s new spawning: check this out for some amazing baby news.
Dr Sij Hemal, 27, a second-year urology resident at Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute, delivered a fellow passenger’s baby boy halfway through the eight-hour flight.
Dr Hemal was hoping for a glass of champagne and a comfortable first class flight home from his best friend’s wedding in India, and was embarking on the Paris to New York leg on the day-long journey when a flight attendant called for medical help over the loudspeaker.
Raising his hand, he was promptly asked to help Toyin Ogyndipe, 41, who had gone into labour a week early – four hours from their destination and two hours away from a safe emergency landing.
Dr Hemal helped the Nigerian banker, who lives and works in the UK, safely deliver her son after 30 minutes of pushing, using the limited plane medical supplies.
Amazingly, he used shoestring to tie and cut the umbilical cord for baby Jake and his relieved mum, with help from a French paediatrician, Dr. Stefanie Ortolan, who was seated next to him on board the flight.
Dr Hemal told the Cleveland Clinic Newsroom:
I was pretty tired from jet lag. I thought I’d just have a drink and fall asleep. As it turned out, I’m glad I didn’t drink anything.
Her contractions were about 10 minutes apart, so the paediatrician and I began to monitor her vital signs and keep her comfortable.
After an hour, Toyin’s contractions accelerated and ‘that’s when we knew we were going to deliver on the plane’ Dr Hemal recalled.
Toyin said she felt composed throughout the delivery, adding:
I was relaxed because I knew I was in safe hands. They did everything a doctor or midwife would have done if I was in the labor room in the hospital. Even better, if you ask me.
Although his practice is in urology, Dr. Hemal delivered seven babies during medical school.
This instance was a little unusual, however, and he wasn’t exactly trained to aid a birth 35,000 feet in the air over Greenland.
He added:
We’re trained to stay calm and think clearly in emergency situations. I just tried to think ahead to what might go wrong, and come up with a creative solution.
So much could have gone wrong, but it didn’t. Being on that particular flight, sitting next to a paediatrician … it’s like it was destiny… everything worked out.
Now, unlike celebrity baby news which seems to clog up news feeds across the land daily, this is a great story we can really get behind.
So Simon McCoy can take a sigh of relief, after he shared this Royal Baby news:
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Toyin, who was accompanied on the flight by her four-year-old daughter, is currently recovering at a friend’s house in New Jersey, with her beautiful newborn, Jake, who was bestowed an American passport as he was born over US airspace.
Both mother and baby are doing well, and Dr Hemal finally got his drink on the less eventful final leg of his journey home.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.