After welcoming five children to the world already, Jess Hogan thought she knew exactly what to expect from childbirth.
But it turned out her “last baby” Max was intent on making a memorable entrance… on the floor of the emergency room.
It was my craziest birth, but also, the most perfect, it was not at all what I had planned,” Jess shared in a blog post.
She’d been having contractions on and off for days when her water broke at home in the middle of the night.
“The pain wasn’t troubling me too badly, I kept telling myself I would just ‘know’ if this was the real thing,” she explained.
“About 1 hour later I woke to a strange, long contraction. It wasn’t incredibly painful, but it caused me enough discomfort that I felt around in the dark for my husband and said ‘Travis, I think this is it.’”
From there, things moved quickly.
The couple raced to the car before Jess even had time to put her shoes on. However, she did get a chance to fire off a text to her birth photographer, Tammy Karin, to let her know the baby was coming.
“I vaguely remember [Travis] mentioning to me we passed a fox and that he had to run two red lights. Luckily for us, it was 3am and the roads were empty our entire drive,” Jess recalled.
“As we neared the last turn to the hospital I began screaming that baby was coming,” she recalled. “Travis honked the horn rapidly as I screamed through the contractions and he pulled quickly into the ER drive.”
She had just made it through the front door of the hospital when Max made his move.
“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!’ Without any hesitation, he did just that as I felt my body involuntarily pushing his head the rest of the way out.”
Incredibly, Tammy arrived at the exact same moment – just in time to see the birth unfold.
“He arrived on the floor just inside the entrance of the emergency room at 3:38am,” Jess penned. “Less than 25 minutes from the time my water broke at home, and only a few moments after we stepped inside the hospital.”
And although Max was bruised from the speedy delivery, he arrived happy and healthy.
“I was also totally in love with the little person laying on me, and even more completely in love with my husband who didn’t miss a beat and kept his word that we would, in fact, make it to the hospital.”
This article originally appeared on Women’s Health Australia.
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