by Kathy Tretter
Note to any first-time dads who aren’t quite sure what to expect. When your wife says she is in labor and the contractions are fairly regular, don’t ask if she can put some ice on it!
That was, however, the response a half-asleep Zachary Pruitt gave to his wife Christina when she woke him around 1 a.m. Sunday morning (August 27) to say, “These pains aren’t going away, they are pretty consistent.”
She kindly let him go back to sleep, ignoring his not-so-sage advice. But two hours later the contractions were no longer something she could try to ignore. So the two left their home in Fordsville, Kentucky and headed for Deaconess Women’s Hospital in Evansville.
Christina was 39 weeks pregnant and since neither had been through this before, the assumption was that while time would be of the essence, first babies usually aren’t in a rush to make their appearance.
Oops, in this case that was truly some bad intel.
The drive would take an hour and a half to their destination, but just as they reached the bridge over the mighty Ohio, Christina’s water broke.
Zach told his wife to call 9-1-1 and as she did, another heavy contraction rolled over her so she tossed the phone to her husband.
Lara Hancock, a Spencer County dispatcher was on the other end of the line, hearing a soon-to-be-mom in distress and a dad who, while she didn’t exactly know this at the time, had no idea whatsoever of how precarious their position happened to be.
“This was the first time in 20 years,” Lara relates, never having been called on as a birthing instructor in all her years as a dispatcher.
The call was received at 4:32 a.m. Zach pulled over right before the construction zone on SR 161 in Spencer County and leapt from the car.
“I could hear Christina screaming,” Lara reports. She told Zach to do a progress check. He ran around to the passenger side and told the dispatcher, “I see a head.”
Zach had not attended labor and delivery classes. “I had never even held an infant,” he notes, after the fact. “I put the phone on speaker and tossed it on top of the car and at 4:35 — three minutes after calling 9-1-1, Miss Brynlynn River Grace Pruitt slid into her daddy’s outstretched hand.
Read the rest of the story in this week’s issue of the Spencer County Leader!
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