Woman delivers baby girl in ambulance stuck in traffic

KARACHI:

When the city’s major thoroughfares were choked in heavy traffic jams on Monday, a little bundle of joy opened her eyes for the first time in an ambulance on one such road.

The baby girl was successfully delivered in an ambulance on main Sharae Faisal. Aman Foundation ambulance’s emergency paramedic Kamran Yousuf, who helped with the delivery, said that it was a great feeling. “I was so thankful that the baby and her mother were well and there was no problem during the birth.”



Narrating the incident, Yousuf said that he and the ambulance’s driver were on their way to Gulberg when some people in a taxi stopped them near Baloch Colony. “A woman, who was having labour pains, was inside [the taxi] and no ambulance was willing to take her to the hospital because of the traffic. We decided to take her.”

The yellow coloured ambulance, equipped with medical kits, was stuck in a massive traffic jam, when the pregnant woman’s female relatives told them to pull the vehicle to the road side as she was about to deliver. “Language was a big problem as the family hardly knew any Urdu and spoke in Pashto,” said Yousuf. “But our driver knew Pashto, so he became the translator.”



Yousuf said that he pulled out the necessary equipment and made arrangements to provide privacy for the woman to give birth in the ambulance. “The women were not letting me touch the [pregnant] woman, so I guided them and told them what to do and kept asking them if the head was coming out first,” he said.

Once the baby was delivered, Yousuf said that he cut the cord, put the oxygen mask on the baby, suctioned the baby and asked the woman to swallow a tablet after giving birth. “The baby was alive and crying,” he said.



The family wanted to go back home in Shafiq Colony and refused to go to the hospital, he said. Yousuf, who has been working with the foundation for the past five years, said that it was his second experience of witnessing a delivery in the ambulance.

As the baby girl’s family does not own a mobile phone, a neighbour Zareed Khan said that both the baby and the mother were fine. He said that no other ambulance was willing to take them to the hospital other than this one. “The staff cooperated with us a lot and helped us,” Khan said.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 3^rd, 2016.