— You can’t make this stuff up.
PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, Md. — A firefighter-paramedic who was born in the back of an ambulance 42 years ago spent his birthday delivering a baby in the back of an ambulance.
The Week reported that Daniel Helsel, 42, was delivered by a paramedic who was working his first shift while his mother was being transported to the hospital.
“We get on the Beltway and he says you are going to have to pull over because the baby is going to come,” Helsel’s father, Jesse, said.
“As soon as that ambulance comes to a stop – I don’t even think it was fully stopped – the side door opens. A state trooper – our son’s guardian angel – comes in. He doesn’t say a word. He assists with the birth and then he leaves.”
Forty-two years later, the veteran firefighter-paramedic said it was fate that put him in the back of another ambulance on his birthday, and this time he was the one delivering the baby.
“We had a pretty good inkling that it was going to happen soon,” Helsel said. “And we wanted to get her out of the apartment and down the steps before it happened. We got about halfway down the stairs when she stopped and started to push. We had to gently remind her we needed to get her somewhere sanitary. So we were able to get her to the ambulance and onto the stretcher. And we could see the top of the baby’s head. That baby was not going to wait.”
Helsel said the mother and baby are both doing well.
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