A Kanata-area mother is thanking the Ottawa paramedics who helped deliver her baby girl in a surprise roadside birth.
“The paramedics were amazing, I would really think they worked at a hospital and did it every day,” Casey Bradley told CTV Ottawa on Sunday. “They were calm the whole time; they knew exactly what they were doing.”
On the evening of April 30th, Bradley, who was pregnant with her second child, was making dinner at home when she went into labour.
Her husband called an ambulance, and while they waited, her contractions began coming on stronger and stronger.
As Bradley and her husband were in the ambulance on their way to the Queensway-Carleton hospital, things took an unexpected turn.
“We had just gotten off the Queensway, we were at (Holly) Acres Road and Richmond Road, and they’d allowed me to push whenever I wanted to the whole way there,” Bradley explained. “I guess the baby was crowning a little more, and they said to the driver, ‘we should probably pull over,’ and within a couple of minutes she was born.”
The crew in the ambulance included paramedics Frédéric Pinsonneault, Andy Ramonal, Superintendent Darrell Drew and student paramedic Nicolas Roy, who was on his final shift of a training placement.
“Her labour progressed quite rapidly on route to the hospital, to the point where delivery became imminent,” said Superintendent Darrell Drew. “The paramedics made a good judgment call to pull over and conduct the delivery right then and there.”
Despite the unforeseen circumstances, Bradley says baby Kendall’s birth went smoothly, thanks to the paramedics on that ambulance.
“They just kept saying ‘you’re doing great! You do what you need to do! We’re here for you, everything is fine,’” Bradley said. “It was so surreal; the paramedics were just calm the whole time, so that played a big part in it. It certainly was not part of our birthing plan.”
After Kendall’s successful birth, Bradley took the time to write a thank you letter to the paramedics who helped bring her daughter into the world.
“We wanted them to know we appreciated everything they did for us in that short time that we were with them that night,” she said.
Ottawa Paramedics shared the letter on their Facebook page, where it’s been liked more than 4,500 times, and shared more than 1,100 times.
“The feedback on Facebook is crazy, and I’m glad people are recognizing the work paramedics do day-to-day,” Bradley said.
“It’s a really great story that Kendall will have for the rest of her life that she can tell her kids. Overall, it was such an amazing experience because of the people that showed up here that night.”
