By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
It was truly a matter of life and death on and around the West Seattle Bridge Tuesday morning.
While thousands will remember it for an incredibly long commute – two families were changed forever.
As reported here yesterday, one of those is the family of Bradly Gilmore, the 53-year-old motorcyclist who died after crashing while swerving to avoid a car in the eastbound lanes of the bridge just before 7 am.
Today, we finally have the rest of the story behind the other situation that briefly complicated the commute, as we had mentioned in our Twitter feed that morning:
(To be specific, the original call on the scanner was about a woman in an SUV whose “water broke” for her second baby.) Commenters later asked what happened with the woman in labor. We found out from Seattle Fire Department that morning that she had been taken to Group Health; we asked their media-relations team if they could tell us what happened, and they said simply that they had given her our phone number.
This afternoon, we finally got to talk by phone with Desir̩e, the mom who gave birth that morning. She tells WSB that her new son Brayden was born 8 minutes after they got to the hospital Рat 8:18 am Tuesday. She agreed to share a photo:
Desirée says her mom was driving her to the hospital when they encountered the traffic jams that had gripped just about every road leading to the West Seattle Bridge that morning. When necessary, Desirée says, she told her mom, “get in the middle lane and drive.” Then they got to the light at Delridge and Genesee. “Mom, just drive!” she urged.
Then – “a big contraction” – and “I said, ‘Mom, the baby’s coming,’ and we pulled over.”
The crew from nearby Station 26 got there within minutes. She said they kept wanting to “pull down the back,” thinking she might deliver at any moment, and Desirée was adamant: “‘I’m NOT going to have the baby on the freeway, I’m going to have it in the hospital.”
They told her, she says, that if she didn’t push, the ambulance MIGHT get there before the baby did.
It did. But then the ambulance had to make its way through the traffic jam, with those two right lanes still blocked off for investigation of the tragic accident only an hour earlier.
She says the drive to the hospital was crazy – they were trying to give her an IV, take her vital signs, “I’m having my contractions and yelling, and we are 10 blocks from the hospital, they’re telling me ‘don’t push, don’t push, just breathe’ – I had maybe five contractions in the ambulance, and once we got to Group Health, it was 8:10, and I had the baby at 8:18.”
Desir̩e says stories of women having their babies in cars on the roadside used to leave her with eyebrows raised Рhow could that happen?
Now that it has almost happened to her, with 9-pound, 5-ounce Brayden, she says, she understands!
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