he delivered in a hospital parking lot.
Magen David Adom paramedic Nathaniel Eitan and EMT Dennis Svchenko were readying their ambulance for their next patient in the parking lot of Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot. Suddenly, they heard wild knocks and shouts from outside. A woman was screaming that her daughter is giving birth.
“We got out of the ambulance and immediately noticed the woman kneeling on the pavement about to give birth,” Nathaniel Eitan recalls. Eitan and Svchenko delivered her baby on the spot.
“We saw that the birth was in full swing. We brought the bed and delivery kit from the ambulance and within a few minutes a cute baby girl came into the world,” says Eitan. “There was one moment of drama when the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. We released it and within seconds she started breathing and crying. So, we also breathed a sigh of relief. We cut the umbilical cord, then we transferred the mother and the baby to the hospital staff who were waiting there.”
“For me it was a particularly exciting event,” says Svchenko, “as it was also the first time I presided at a delivery, which took place in an unusual place and had a happy ending. I wish Laor and her new sweet daughter good health.”
The mother, Laor Simchi, is beyond grateful. “It happened so fast, I can’t even absorb it all,” she says.
“This is my second birth but I will not forget it. I was with my mother right at the entrance to the emergency room and I just could not stop it. My mother started shouting and two angels came right out of the ambulance in the parking lot of the hospital. I did not even reach the sidewalk.”
