Dispatchers help deliver three babies since November

PALMER — It’s hard to describe the experience of being an emergency dispatcher talking a father through the delivery of his baby.

Is it tense? Maybe not more than other calls. Thrilling? Not quite the right word. Joyous? Probably more thrilling for the father.

Whatever the experience is, it’s not something Sarah Beranek was familiar with herself before Jan. 29. Beranek is a dispatcher II for the city of Palmer. She’s been there two years and she says she loves her job.

“Every day is different and I’m able to help people,” she said. “It’s usually the worst day of a person’s life and I’m able to help them.”

Beranek remembers the Jan. 29 call well.

“We’ve had a home birth before and I see a foot,” the caller told her.

That it was a foot and not a head complicated things, as breech births are tricky and dangerous.

“Sarah quickly went through case entry and to the breech delivery panel in ProQA instructing the mother to stand, bend her knees and squat,” reads an email Beranek’s supervisor, Alaina Anderson, wrote recounting the events. ProQA is a program that helps dispatchers with instructions for various medical emergencies.

Anderson praised Beranek for being calm, encouraging and reassuring during the call.

Anderson wrote that email, then read it aloud during a ceremony Tuesday at which she presented Beranek with a pin with a stork on it, an award for helping deliver a baby over the phone.

Anderson has actually handed out three stork pins in the past three months. The first was in November when dispatcher Jeri Wallin helped a father deliver a baby. Two minutes after medics arrived on scene the baby was out. The second was Jan. 12 when dispatcher Amber Church talked another father through a complete delivery over the phone. That delivery was quick — just three minutes into the call.

“Oh, he’s out,” the father says on the 911 call as Church starts reading him instructions.

Anderson said that before Wallin’s call, dispatchers hadn’t talked a family through a delivery in years — not since Valley Hospital was operating in Palmer.

Beranek said that as she talked to the caller the mother was in a bathtub of water. At one point her caller dropped the phone into water.

“He was like, ‘oh, my gosh can you still hear me? You just went for a swim!’” she recalled Thursday. Later, after both legs were out, “he said, ‘oh, it’s a girl!’ And I said, ‘oh! Congratulations!’”

The baby was out up to its armpits by the time medics arrived. And here’s where the call became emotionally difficult — the baby wasn’t breathing when it was born. Medics performed CPR and took baby and mother to the hospital.

Beranek and Anderson said they were wondering how mother and child were doing. They said they didn’t want to celebrate the call with a ceremony featuring pizza and a pin — presented upside down since the baby was breech — if the baby didn’t make it.

The mystery was solved recently when Beranek’s husband, who is studying to be a teacher, was talking to a friend in one of his classes. The guy said he hadn’t been around much because he and his wife had just had a baby.

Turns out it was the same guy Beranek had walked through the delivery. And the baby is fine.

Now how does it feel?

“It was amazing,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.

Emergency dispatchers helping families deliver babies is a relatively rare occurrence. Rare, that is, until this past November. Since then, it’s happened three times to three separate Palmer dispatchers.

• Nov. 30: Dispatcher Jeri Wallin was giving a father instructions on where to use pressure to slow the baby’s arrival when medics arrived. It was an 11-minute call. Just over two minutes after medics showed up the baby was out.

• Jan. 12: Dispatcher Amber Church was on the phone with a father for just three minutes before the baby was out.

• Jan. 29: Dispatcher Sarah Beranek talked a father through the delivery to the point where the baby was out up to her armpits before medics arrived. The baby wasn’t breathing initially but, Beranek has since heard, she’s doing fine now.