The birth of a child is supposed to be one the happiest moments of a parent's life, but that is not always the case. Some serious drama can go down in the delivery room, as is quite evident in the following stories.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
He Was Convinced The Baby Wasn’t His
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He handed it back and said, ‘This ain’t mine,’ and left the room. The poor girl was hysterical crying. He came back and started screaming at her for cheating because the baby was ‘too light-skinned.’ Everyone was saying babies all come out white but he started yelling at everyone who said that. He said he wouldn’t see either of them until he had a paternity test in his hand and left.
He never came back.”
The Actual Father Couldn’t Make The Call
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“Where to start…
1) Baby daddy and grandma are in the delivery room. We’re setting up the table to deliver and cheerfully ask, ‘Okay dad, want to cut the cord?’ Baby daddy loses his cool. ‘Not if this she-devil is in the room!’ and points to the grandma. They get into a yelling match and meanwhile the patient and I make awkward eye contact while the nurse and the other resident try to calm them down. We deliver the baby and I cut the cord.
2) Couple with no prenatal care shows up in labor. End up needing a c-section. We get the baby out and I’m closing up when the baby daddy starts yelling at us and accusing us of being not real doctors. We keep on going and ignore him. He demands to talk to the CEO of the hospital and keeps on standing up and looking over the drape. At one point, he is behind me until the nurse gets him to sit down. Finally, we finish up as he’s yelling at us. She never shows up for follow up appointments but later ends up with a surgical site infection. They try to sue us. I always wonder if there was some underlying abuse there.
3) Mom asks if the baby is mixed….in front of baby daddy who is the same race.
4) Baby daddy asking for paternity tests the minute baby is born. Chill.
5) Crunchy granola couple come in to see if mom is in labor. They pass out pamphlets for their birth plan. It’s made to look like a playbill. Cute. Start to read it, nothing seems too off, they want to wash the baby, they don’t know if it’s a boy or girl and want dad to announce… Except I get to the end and they specifically request no verbal communication with mom. All communication must go through dad. No referring to the baby as ‘baby,’ refer to the baby as ‘special soul.’ Those requests were quickly ignored.
6) I’m doing an initial prenatal visit for a mom on suboxone. Good for her, trying to get over her addiction. She seems motivated, she’s excited, baby daddy seems excited. Both seem like a cute couple. I’m doing a quick ultrasound in the room and he randomly asks ‘so can you tell me who the dad is?’
‘You need a DNA paternity test for that.’
Mom looks shocked.
‘Well let’s do it.’
‘We don’t do them until the baby is born. The method for doing it before delivery has risks associated with it so we don’t do genetic testing unless we think there’s a risk of a birth defect.’
‘Then WHY am I here?’
Mom is bawling at this point. I ask him to leave.
7) This is sad. Mom comes in on coke with an abruption. Kid gets delivered by emergency section and goes to NICU. Brain dead. Basically only has some episodic spasms of movement. Cops tell mom she can’t withdraw life support because then she’s on the hook for manslaughter, so she doesn’t. And the guy she put down as the dad on the birth certificate? Her husband whom she cheated on who doesn’t give a crap about what’s going on. The real baby daddy has no say in withdrawing life support. Made me cry.
8) The teens who get pregnant and their moms who somehow think withholding an epidural will make them think twice about premarital coitus. Okay, but let’s do some birth control instead? So messed up.
9) Mom’s cousin is with her as she rolls in at 9 cm with her 3rd kid. She’s Snapchatting pictures of herself posing next to mom who looks very uncomfortable. We deliver baby whom she deems her ‘hot lil nephew.’ MA’AM HE IS FIVE MINUTES OLD.
10) Med student gets recognized by baby daddy as he helped deliver his other baby mama.”
“Can You Get Rid Of Him?”
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“I heard this from an elderly client who used to be an obstetrician. He was telling me stories about when he used to deliver babies at peoples’ homes way back in the day.
He was telling me about his son, and I asked if he delivered his own son. He said yes and told me the most amazing, heartbreaking, and heartwarming story.
In the late ’40s, the town ambulance/hearse/taxi pulled up at his little independent practice out in rural Illinois. A volunteer firefighter came in and said they had a lady in labor and they wouldn’t make it to the hospital, which was over an hour away. He told them to bring her in. He delivered the baby and mom passed out. All seemed normal.
The mom later woke up, and the doctor came in to give her the baby. She started screaming, ‘Get it away from me!’
The doctor was confused and couldn’t figure out what was going on with the mother. She started flailing around and screaming that she didn’t want to look at ‘it.’
When the doctor later returned with the child, the mother still looked terrified, as if the newborn had nine heads. He finally asked, ‘Well, what do you want me to do with your son?’
The mom remained silent for a long time, and as the doctor was getting up to leave, she quietly asked, ‘Can you get rid of him?’
The doctor asked what she meant. She said, ‘You know. Maybe just make him go to sleep so he won’t wake up.’
He said it took everything in him to not beat this woman to death right then and there. He went off on a tangent about how much he loved his work working with all the new mothers in all these little towns full of ‘salt of the earth’ people with great family values. On and on about how happy it made him bringing life into the world and this woman wanted him to murder her baby.
When the doctor asked why she wanted to get rid of the baby, the mother said that her husband was in the military and the child was not his. She couldn’t let him find out. He understood her rationale for not wanting her husband to know, but murder? He suggested family, an orphanage, and other options. She said no to all of them because she ‘couldn’t risk this coming back to haunt her.’
He told her he’d see what he could do and he let her rest. The next day, he tried to talk to her again, and she was more adamant about ‘making it sleep.’ She said she wanted to hold her baby. He refused since he thought she’d try to kill him herself. She went nuts.
In the end, he sent her home and told her that he’d given the baby to his brother who was a pastor and was unable to have children. He promised he’d never tell anyone who she was.
Then he said he ‘taught her a lesson.’ If she ever found herself pregnant again, she would come to him whether it was her husband’s or not. If he ever found out she went elsewhere, he’d tell everyone the story. He said he did this because he was afraid she’d get knocked up and kill the next one. And he knew he’d find out if she went elsewhere because he was the only baby doctor for five towns and knew other docs at the hospitals.
She never had any other kids. Supposedly, she died from an overdose a few years later.
The doctor and his wife raised that baby as their own son. His wife wasn’t able to have kids, and the pastor brother was a fib just to make her think he’d already given the baby away. He eventually told his son a watered down version of the story when the kid was older. The kid ended up becoming a plastic surgeon and had nine kids of his own. He’s doing very well, he’s very happy, and he probably never would have had a shot had that small town fireman tried to press on to the hospital and wound up delivering the kid in the middle of nowhere. He was convinced she would have delivered and then smothered the baby by the time they got to the hospital.”
Always Wear A Seatbelt
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“When I was an intern, we had a woman who was eight-months pregnant get crushed in a head-on collision. The mom was pulseless on the scene, so EMS brought her in immediately. We had about a 60-second warning in the emergency room to get the OBGYN crash team and the NICU response team down.
It was clear the mom wasn’t going to make it, but we had to try to keep her alive so we could do a perimortem C-section to get the kid out alive. I was on the trauma team, so while I was working on trying to keep the mom’s circulation going to perfuse the uterus, the obstetrician started the delivery. We opened the woman’s chest to start internal compressions and to see if there was an aortic injury we could temporize.
A C-section is usually fast; perimortem sections are faster. From skin cut to baby out and over to NICU team was about 45 seconds. Only then, the obstetrician started freaking out. And that’s when we found it.