A small survey from The Practicing Midwife out of the UK recently found that many fathers don't feel included enough in their wives’ birth experience. David Hererra is not one of those dads. KENS5 reports that he delivered his fourth baby, Isabel -– in the hospital -– when the doctor was nowhere in sight.
Hererra's wife, Isabel Delgado, was in the delivery room at Christus Santa Rosa Hospital in Westover Hills, Texas on March 25th when she was ready to push. Hererra sent his nephew to find the doctor, but the boy was unsuccessful. The family later learned that the one on-call doctor was called into an emergency delivery, KENS5 reports.
There was a nurse in the room, but Delgado looked at her husband and said, "You can do this," she told the news station.
Herrera put on surgical gloves, recalled the delivery of his first three sons and remembered what the doctor did. Everything went smoothly, but happened very quickly. The couple forgot to note the time their new daughter was born. "We looked at the clock, and we were like, 'Maybe five minutes ago,'" Delgado said.
The hospital sent the following statement to KENS5:
"We take patient concerns seriously and conduct internal reviews surrounding patient concerns. Labor and Delivery nurses are trained to deliver babies when delivery of the baby is imminent." - CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Health System.
A new study has found that, on average, labor now takes two hours longer than it did 50 years ago. But when moms, like Delgado, don’t fit into that mold, sometimes it’s dad to the rescue. Recently, dad Brent Farrell of Stapleford, U.K. had to knock down the bathroom door that his partner had accidentally locked to deliver their child. Just a few days earlier, Jeremiah Hoylman of Keokuk County, Iowa had to pull over and deliver his baby on the side of a road because his wife’s water had broken and he knew they wouldn’t make it to the hospital.