Baby, baby, baby, baby: City ambulance crews deliver four babies in 12-months

LACONIA — The first three of Diaka Conde’s children were born a week after their due date, so she didn’t have any reservations about taking appointments at her Union Avenue salon on Oct. 25 of last year. After all, her fourth child – her first daughter – wasn’t due until Oct. 31.

“In the morning I started getting cramping,” Conde said, but she wasn’t concerned. “I thought it was a false alarm. I had two clients that day and I was like, anyway, let me go to work.” By the time she finished braiding her first client’s hair, she knew that the alarm was real.

Conde’s daughter, a healthy six-pound baby they call Diamond, was delivered in a Laconia Fire Department ambulance that barely made it in time. It was one of four babies that city paramedics delivered within a 12-month period, the most recent occurring on Jan. 11. That’s unusual, said Chief Kirk Beattie, as many paramedics go their entire career without seeing a birth outside of a hospital. Laconia, though, will likely continue to be an outlier in this regard, since Lakes Region General Hospital closed its maternity ward on May 30, 2018.

In two of those four recent births, they would have still occurred in the field even if LRGH, located within the city, was still operating its maternity ward. With the other two, Beattie said, the ambulance made it well past the city limits, meaning that there would have been plenty of time to get the mother to LRGH instead of Concord Hospital, which is where most local expectant women are directed.

Beattie said four in a one-year time span is a lot, but he said it’s probably less of an aberration and more an indicator of things to come.

“We’ve done four in 12 months, I would say we haven’t done four in the last five or six years combined,” Beattie said. The city’s ambulances are also making more routine transports to Concord Hospital for other maternity issues, he said. “If women are late in their pregnancy and if there’s anything that might be pregnancy related, we are transporting them to Concord, which is a new thing for us as well. We do a lot more of those than we ever have before.”

Though delivering a baby isn’t as common as other calls, Beattie said it’s a situation that his paramedics are prepared to handle. As part of their certification, paramedics spend time training in maternity wards, helping mothers in labor and caring for newborn infants.

“A lot of our personnel has had quite a bit of training on it,” Beattie said. “They are comfortable with the process and with the procedures. They just want it to go well. If every goes well, it’s a very positive thing.”

Travis Clark, a paramedic and firefighter, was on duty for the most recent delivery. The call came in as a pregnancy problem, and the ambulance crew collected the patient for what they expected to be a routine transfer to Concord.

“We didn’t realize that she was actually in labor until we were 10 minutes outside of Laconia,” Clark said. So the ambulance pulled over on the side of the road. “At that point, you just ready yourself for the imminent delivery. We were fortunate enough to have a healthy delivery, there were no complications.”

Beattie said that it’s something of a point of pride for emergency medicine professionals to have helped welcome a baby into the world. His department is planning to hold a ceremony soon to honor them with stork pins.

Clark said, “My dad’s been an EMT for over 30 years, and he’s never had that call. I was fortunate enough to get that call within my first few years in my career.”

“All the ones we’ve delivered since I’ve been here have gone successfully,” Beattie said. “We’ll keep that track record going.”

On Oct. 25, back at Conde’s salon, she said she called her husband when she realized that her daughter was ready to be born. He arrived, along with their other children, moments later, but by then it was clear that she needed to call 9-1-1.

“By the time the ambulance arrived at the braiding salon, the baby was almost out,” she said. She birthed Diamond in the ambulance and was first taken to LRGH for the initial neonatal care, then she and the baby were put back in the ambulance and transported to Concord, where they spent a few days recovering.

Now a few months old, Diamond is happy and thriving, Conde said. Her daughter’s biggest problem is that her older brothers fight over whose turn it is to play with her. Now that it’s all done, Conde said she’s glad that it went the way that it did, and she’s grateful for the care she received.

“They were fast, they did a great job, they were amazing,” Conde said. “Laconia ambulance crew, I would like to thank them very, very much. They did a great job. I will never forget that day. I felt blessed. Thanks to them, everything went well. I can’t thank them enough for what they did for me that day. They are heroes.”