I Delivered a Baby on My Flight to New York

On December 17, I was on my way home from my friend’s wedding. I’d already flown from New Delhi to Paris and was on an Air France flight from Paris to New York. (From JFK airport, I’d fly to Cleveland, Ohio, where I’m a second-year urology resident at the Cleveland Clinic. I'm 27.)

I was sitting in economy class was wearing a Cleveland Clinic jacket and the woman next to me was like "Oh you work at the Cleveland Clinic? I trained in the US, I’m a pediatrician, but now I do Doctors Without Borders and I work in Senegal." Her name is Susan Shepherd and she also works for ALIMA, the Alliance for International Medical Action. It was just a coincidence.

I was about halfway through the movie Side Effects and I’d ordered some champagne because my goal was to fall asleep on the flight. I thought I’d have a drink and doze off. Then they announced in French that they needed a doctor.

The woman who asked for medical help, Toyin Ogundipe, said she had pain that started in the abdomen and was radiating to her back. She was covered in a blanket so the first thing that came to my mind was kidney stones. I’m in urology, so that’s what we see every time someone says flank pain.

Then she pulled down the blanket and said she was pregnant. At that point I realized she may be having contractions.

She was about 39 weeks along, full term, so I don’t know how she was allowed to fly. She was flying from Nigeria so she could have been cleared from their standpoint, but I don’t know if there were extenuating circumstances because of which she was supposed to fly to the States.

I delivered seven babies in medical school at Wake Forest so I knew what to do. I told Dr. Shepherd what was going on and I told the flight attendant, "we need to examine her, let’s move her to first class." There was hardly anyone there.

I needed to give her more privacy, first of all, and if there were any complications, we didn’t want any restraints from a space standpoint. I was anticipating the worst, which would have been if she was hemorrhaging, if she had cardiac arrest—if something rare but very bad were to happen, we needed our space. And we needed to move because you can destroy the calm of everyone on the plane, right?

We took bed sheets that were on the plane we placed them under the mom. We had her undress and put on kind of a makeshift gown. Then I put on a sterile gown from the plane’s medical kit and gloves and a mask.

Then we kind of divided and conquered. I started an IV and Dr. Shepherd started measuring her blood pressure. Some of the flight crew took care of her daughter, Amy, who was traveling with her. She’s 4.

Toyin went from having contractions every 10 minutes to every two minutes in the matter of an hour. Initially our goal was to take her to the closest place to get medical care, which would have meant diverting the plane to the Azores Islands in the middle of the Atlantic. I didn’t anticipate delivering on the flight, but her contractions accelerated so fast and her water broke; she was going to give birth. There was no point in diverting.

After about 30 minutes of pushing, she gave birth to a boy and named him Jake. We got the placenta out and then placed it in a container…it might have been in a sheet folded in wrapping stuff. We used a surgical clamp and a string to tie off the umbilical cord and then cut it off with scissors, all from the medical kit.

Jake seemed healthy and he started nursing. Dr. Shepherd did an APGAR score [a quick test to assess a baby’s condition] right after the baby was born so it was great for her to be there and help get him nursing.

We gave him a sock as a baby hat. It was from one of Air France’s first class kits. The baby was so tiny that it fit.

She did have a little bit of bleeding after the placenta came out, but we just used pressure to stop it. Luckily it was fine, but I would’ve liked to have some sutures in the medical kit just in case. Mom and baby were taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in New York and they’re doing great.

When I got back to work, my colleagues asked, ‘are you sure you’re in the right specialty?’ But I love urology, that’s what I enjoy.

Our medical school gave us very good hands-on training and at the Cleveland Clinic they give you the right analytical skills to really think through a situation and anticipate the worst. This was a very beautiful experience and with God’s grace we were able deliver the baby. I’m so thankful for Dr. Shepherd and the outstanding crew.

America and the whole world is so polarized right now but at 35,000 feet all of us came together from different backgrounds, different walks of life—French people, American people, Indian people—everyone’s coming together for one cause, to help this woman. It just goes to show that we can come together in peace and harmony as human beings. That kind of dawned on me a few weeks later.

Air France sent me a travel voucher and a bottle of champagne since I never got my glass on the flight. I haven’t drank it yet. I’m getting a new town home so I’m waiting to inaugurate it with that champagne because it’s so nice.

After the news stories came out, my Facebook has been blowing up with people that I haven’t talked to since high school. I’m getting text messages from people I haven’t heard from in years. I didn’t expect it to go viral like this.

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