The entire time that she was pregnant, 27-year-old Vidya (name changed) possibly didn’t have too many dreams about her first child making a grand entry into the world. Hailing from a family of limited means in Choolaimedu, she wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told her any time before Monday that her daughter would be born on the upscale Harrington road. As things turned out, that’s exactly what happened — except, the child wasn’t born in a spotless hospital ward, but inside a 108 ambulance.
Vidya, who had been due to go in to labour sometime over the course of this week, suddenly experienced labour pains at 1 pm and her family called 108 for assistance. “This is how most people in the southern districts react. They immediately call us and we take it up to try and get them to a hospital for childbirth,” explains Regional Manager B Prabhudoss, from GVK-EMRI that runs the 108 service along with the Government of Tamil Nadu.
However, this wasn’t a call from a village — it was from a congested street in Choolaimedu, from where Kilpauk Medical College (KMC) is but a stone’s throw away. “By the time the vehicle had reached Harrington road, it was around 1.40 pm and she began to give birth. Our Emergency Management Technician (EMT) knew that the baby would be born right there and so he asked the driver to stop right there,” he adds.
Strapping on their delivery kits, EMTs K Sivaraman and J Kaliselvan began to ease the woman into delivering the child safely and with as little stress as possible. As luck would have it, the natural childbirth went off without a hitch and a healthy 1.8 kg female child was born in the ambulance — chalking one more successful ‘amby baby’ birth. This came right after a woman in Tondiarpet had given birth in an ambulance to her fourth child, while being rushed to the RSRM hospital.Over the past five years (Sept 2008-March 2013) that they have been offering the service, 8,864 babies across TN have been born in ambulances, but the number has been very low in the city.
Despite the fact that their technicians are well trained in birthing and obstetric trauma, their first preference is always to get the child to a hospital, “We even offer the service of taking the pregnant woman to whichever OB-GYN she has been consulting through her pregnancy, with distance no bar,” says Prabhudoss. In a city like ours, with uncontrollable traffic, the next time someone has a pregnancy-related emergency, calling 108 instead of rushing out in your car may just be a better idea.
