Middle Georgia dad delivers baby in bathtub with phone help from ambulance dispatcher
His infant son was about to be born in a bathtub, but Christopher Lester did not panic.
He knew the drill.
Baby Josiah would his sixth boy, and Lester, an automobile mechanic, had once helped doctors deliver one of his sons at the hospital. Even so, Lester knew the bathroom at their home on the outskirts of Byron may not be ideal labor-and-delivery scene.
In the small hours of Oct. 28, he and wife Chasity had just returned home from a local hospital. Chasity wasn’t due until Nov. 11, but she was having contractions.
When they got home about 4 a.m., Christopher recalled, “She walked through the threshold of the bedroom door and said, ‘Um, baby.’ And as soon as she said that, her water broke.”
Christopher led her to their bathtub.
“I’ll be honest,” he said with grin, “I didn’t want to mess my bed up.”
An emergency call
Then he dialed for an ambulance. Emergency dispatcher Dominique Walton at Community Ambulance in Macon answered his call.
“Oh, lord,” Walton told herself, “I do not want to deliver no baby over the phone.”
But Christopher, a father of 9, 7, 6, 4 and 1-year-old boys, put her at ease.
“He was calm,” she said. “That’s what made me calm.”
Before long, Walton was guiding him. Christopher switched his phone on speaker and set it down.
He had to focus.
An ambulance and paramedics were on the way.
But so was baby Josiah. He was coming faster. He would get there first.
“I didn’t have any idea how I was gonna cut the cord and deliver my son all at the same time,” Christopher recalled. ”Because I knew that the placenta still had to be fetched, and if you’re not careful you can hurt the baby if you hold it too high or too low, and things can go wrong.”
Walton offered more instruction.
“Which involved a shoelace and a safety pin,” Christopher said, “which I couldn’t find in the heat of the moment. But I did manage to find the shoelace, which I didn’t end up needing.”
‘I had to roll him like a little hot dog’
A little more than 20 minutes or so into the call, Josiah was born tangled in his umbilical cord.
“I had to roll him like a little hot dog to get him out of it,” Christopher said.
A couple of minutes later, the ambulance arrived and a paramedic cut the cord. Meanwhile on the phone, Walton listened.
“After hearing the baby’s first cry,” she said, “it warmed my heart. I took a break to go cry.”
A meeting
On Thursday at the ambulance office in Macon, the Lesters met Walton.
Chasity Lester, with baby Josiah in tow, noticed Walton sitting at table.
“So,” Chasity asked, “you’re the lady that was on the phone with us?”
Walton nodded.
“I’m so sorry,” Chasity said, smiling, apologizing for being “very loud” on the phone.
No worries, Walton said.
Christopher chimed in, saying Chasity is “used to talking over six boys.”
Then he thanked Walton and the ambulance crew.
“There were some things,” he said, “I just couldn’t do it all by myself.”
Of Walton, Chasity said, “She didn’t physically have to be out there, but she was out there.”
“Yeah,” Christopher said, “she was.”
Before saying their goodbyes, Chasity handed Josiah to Walton to hold.
Walton pulled the baby close and told him, “I didn’t do nothing. It was your dad that did everything.”
“No,” Josiah’s father said, “that was God.”
This story was originally published November 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.