Aleisha Friesen and Sheldon Bryson will have an amazing birth story to tell their new baby Kai when he grows up.
The six pound, nine ounce baby boy was eager to make his appearance last Sunday, and he wasn’t about to wait for his mother to get to the hospital.
The parents, from Langdale, were on their way to Sechelt Hospital when Friesen started feeling the need to push.
She had been in what’s termed as “early labour” since Feb. 13 – with contractions about three minutes apart – but hospital staff had sent her home four times as the labour wasn’t advancing.
On Feb. 28, at about 8 a.m., Friesen woke up and had a shower – and then the contractions started coming on much faster.
“By the time we got in the car, it was only about 20 seconds in between contractions and we live in Langdale, so we started driving,” Friesen said.
“I was starting to shake when a contraction would come, almost like a seizure. My whole body would just flop around, I think, because I just didn’t have a long ramp-up time. It just kind of hit me.”
As the couple were coming into Wilson Creek, she started to feel pressure and the need to push.
“By now there was almost no time between the contractions – only a couple seconds – and I said, ‘I think I can feel the head coming,’ and Sheldon’s like ‘No, no you don’t.’ And just as we were basically passing the pier in Davis Bay, he said he looked down and could see the top bit of the head,” Friesen said.
“So he pulled off the highway just as you start going up the hill out of Davis Bay, and he pulled the e-break with his right hand and reached over with his left hand and the baby’s face was in the palm of his hand.”
Friesen said with the next contraction the baby’s shoulders came out, and by the third contraction, the baby was born in the passenger seat of the couple’s car.
“I just put him right on my tummy and immediately he started making little crying sounds and we could see that his airway was clear and there was no cord issues with wrapping around the neck or anything like that. It was just perfect,” Friesen said.
Bryson called 9-1-1 to request assistance, but Friesen said the off-Coast dispatcher didn’t know where they were and transferred their call to Kamloops. Not getting the help they needed through 9-1-1, Bryson and Friesen decided to just drive the rest of the way to the hospital and get help there.
“We just pulled straight up at the front entrance, almost as if the car was going to drive through the doors, and Sheldon ran in and said that I was in the car and I had just had a baby, and the nurses said that they didn’t really believe him because this doesn’t happen very often,” Friesen said, noting the doctor also thought it was a joke at first.
“But then people started coming out and were like, ‘Oh, this is really happening.’”
Nurses cut the baby’s cord and checked him over.
“They have this Apgar score thing and he was perfect. He got 10 out of 10. And then they took me up on a stretcher. It was pretty exciting,” Friesen said.
The couple decided to name their new little miracle Kai because the name held significant meaning to the place he was born.
“It was a name we liked and we knew it had a bunch of different meanings from various ethnic groups. One of them means ‘from the sea’ and one of them means ‘pier in a harbour’ – and since his head started coming out right as we were passing the pier, we thought that was very fitting,” Friesen said.
Baby, Mom and Dad are now at home in Langdale with big sister Grace. They look forward to telling Kai about his extraordinary birth once he’s old enough to understand it.
