Fort Worth mom gave birth standing up in hospital parking lot — on Friday the 13th
Alfredo and Andrea Ramirez had specific prayers about the birth of their third child. Andrea prayed for a natural birth in the daytime and for the baby to weigh 7 pounds. The couple both prayed for a baby boy.
However, they were not specific about the location of the birth. The oversight was something Alfredo considered as, on Friday the 13th, his wife’s water broke as she stood in the parking lot of a Texas Health Resources hospital in Bedford.
Alfredo got down on one knee, reached underneath his wife’s torso and caught the infant with his bare hands.
“It was a little different than we expected,” Alfredo said.
“All glory to God,” Andrea said. “That’s all I can say.”
Andrea woke up at about 4 a.m. Friday with contractions. She began to dutifully count through the minutes between them. When she gave birth to her 5-year-old and 3-year-old daughters, they waited to go to the hospital until the contractions were about five minutes about, so she and her husband figured they would do the same with this labor. Andrea checked her to-go bags and waited.
At about 7 a.m., the couple left the kids with Alfredo’s sister and headed to Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Hurst-Euless-Bedford. They parked near the emergency room side of the building but, as she got out of the car, she started to realize the labor was progressing rapidly.
“She wasn’t expecting things to rush from zero to 100 that fast,” Alfredo said. “As soon as she stepped out of the vehicle, she said, ‘I cannot really take any more steps.’”
At 7:28 a.m., Andrea counted out her last contraction and, as she stood near the back of the car, her water broke. Alfredo looked around but no hospital staff were nearby. He could see a hospital security guard far off in the lot and started whistling and yelling for help.
“Then I said, you know what, it’s gonna happen here,” he said.
Alfredo acted quickly. He got onto the pavement, helped wiggle Andrea’s pants down to create a net for the baby and saw his son was already crowning.
“She was just standing the whole time, and I put my hand to hold his head as he is coming out,” he said. “And I see the rest of his body in my right hand, and his little booty landed on me.”
The baby started crying as Alfredo held him and he handed the baby to Andrea.
‘A super unusual scene’
In his 16 years in emergency room care, nurse Nik Swiderski has seen people deliver babies in cars outside the hospital’s doors, in the ambulance bay and even in the front entrance of the hospital. So when someone ran into the emergency room — where he was on duty as the nurse supervisor — and said a woman was having a baby near the ambulance bay, he expected to deal with one of those scenarios.
He did not expect to see a couple in the distance, standing in the middle of the parking lot holding a freshly born baby.
“Everyone was standing there,” he said. “The mother was standing there holding the baby in a towel. The husband was standing there. The baby was still attached to the umbilical cord, still attached to placenta.”
Swiderski ran to the couple and was the first medic on the scene where Alfredo had delivered the baby just seconds before. He and his crew started to assess the mother and baby.
“She looked fantastic, considering she had just delivered in the parking lot,” he said.
They helped Andrea onto a stretcher and wheeled her into the hospital.
For Swiderski, seeing someone deliver in the parking lot was definitely a first. Especially since the birth happened on Friday the 13th — coincidentally, Swiderski’s daughter was also born on a Friday the 13th — the strange story was the talk of the hospital.
“It was a super unusual scene,” Swiderski said. “But it definitely went very, very well considering.”
On Monday, Andrea and the baby were back home and everyone was doing well, the family said. Alfredo said they named the baby in honor of the person who delivered him — Alfredo Jr.
Andrea and Alfredo are Christians, and they consider the story a way to share the goodness of God. They started calling the day “Faithful Friday” instead of the spooky “Friday the 13th” moniker. For Andrea, she said the birth was strangely easier than her previous labors.
“Giving birth standing up was a lot better than laying on my back,” she said. “I would do it again.”
This story was originally published May 18, 2022 at 4:27 PM.
