By Hannah Schenker
Ahhh…the best laid plans, and all that! Birth is one of those things in life that you can plan out in great detail, and at the last moment have all your plans dashed by nature intervening. That’s what happened for Jes Hogan and baby Maxwell, who was born right in the hallway of the hospital before they could even make it to the delivery room.
Talk about making an entrance! And all captured by Kansas birth photographer Tammy Karin.
Maxwell was Hogan’s sixth baby, and it was a fairly straightforward pregnancy compared to her others in which she’d been hospitalised for complications. Things were going well.
Labour began slowly, and Hogan first went to hospital after a night of contractions. However, after labouring in the tub at the hospital for four hours and then having no progress and contractions slowing down, they made the decision to head home and try for an intervention-free birth.
“We spent the following days gently encouraging the contractions, hoping to edge them on into labor,” Hogan says in her birth story on Little Leapling Photography‘s website. “At home I was 5 cm dilated but would not move any further and contractions were uncomfortable, but never really gave me the feeling they would amount to anything more than a sleepless night.”
Four days passed at home with Hogan getting little sleep each night due to contractions but not real progress, and she started to lose faith in whether her body actually knew what it was doing.
Assuming she would “just know” when it was really time to return to the hospital, Hogan even reached out to an online group of expectant mamas, complaining about it all and even voicing her fears of not making it to the hospital in time. If only she’d listened to her own intuition! “After all, this was my 6th baby. I should know these things, right?” she said.
Then after being woken by one contraction that felt different, enough to get her out of bed, she reached for her husband and said, “Travis, I think this is it.” Finally, after rolling out of bed, her waters broke. In absolute shock, she told her husband “Oh god, we’re not going to make it. We are going to have this baby at home.”
But her husband was insistent that they’d make it to the hospital, walking her out of the house and to the car, in a state of complete preparation and calm that Hogan was in awe of. From then on, she was labouring intensely in the car as they sped to the hospital, calling birth photographer Tammy Karin of Little Leapling Photography on the way who managed to meet them there.
With no time to lose, Hogan and her husband just made it through the second set of ER doors when she had to stop, drop and give birth!
“I know at this point I said something to the effect of, “Oh god, he’s here”. I then started to take my pants off because I could feel my body pushing the baby’s head out. I reached down and could feel his head crowning with my hand. I looked at my husband and said, ‘Travis catch him!'”
The ER nurse who reached them first quickly supported his head, and her husband still had his hands on baby’s head too. The nurse removed his cord that was loosely around his neck, now his head was completely out.
See next page for the rest of these amazing photos!
