A safe arrival on Highway 11

EMS co-ordinator Adrian Schmiedge poses with Owen Tannahill and his mom Lacey, days after he helped deliver the child in the back of an ambulance.

By Joel van der Veen

BLADWORTH — It was a special delivery Lacey and Chase Tannahill won’t soon forget.

The couple welcomed their newborn son Owen around 5 p.m. on Sept. 5, weighing 7 lbs. 8 oz., measuring 20.5 inches long.

He arrived while his mother was laying on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, stopped on the side of Highway 11 just north of Bladworth.

The Tannahills were en route from Liberty to Saskatoon to deliver their child, but pulled over once they realized the birth was imminent.

A 9-1-1 call summoned the ambulance from Davidson, and within a minute of climbing aboard, Lacey had given birth.

“It came fast, very, very fast,” said Lacey. “Once the ambulance got there, I settled down quite a bit . . . I was a lot calmer once I got in there.”

“We knew it’d be fairly quick,” said Chase. “We didn’t know it’d be as quick as it was.”

The Tannahills and their three children live on a farm one mile north and a half-mile west of Liberty. Chase farms and also works on the Imperial ambulance, along with occasional shifts with Davidson EMS.

He was on the combine around 4 p.m. that day when Lacey, 39½ weeks pregnant, called to say her water was leaking.

Chase rushed home, and before long, he, Lacey and their three-year-old son Caleb were in the van, headed for Saskatoon.

The Tannahills left the farm and drove west on the 749 grid road that connects with Highway 11 at Girvin.

Lacey said the plan all along was to take Caleb with them to the hospital, where her parents would meet them. As they drove along, she said, they began questioning the wisdom of that plan.

Fortunately, Caleb fell asleep once they hit the paved highway and slept through the entire event. (Their older daughter Sianna, 10, was at school.)

They had just passed Bladworth when Lacey said she needed to start pushing.

Chase pulled over and called 9-1-1. He then got out and opened the back hatch of the minivan, laying the seats down.

“We got ready just in case I was going to have to deliver it there,” Chase said.

A Heartland EMS ambulance soon arrived, with paramedics Adrian Schmiedge and Jonathan Taylor on board.

Lacey laid down on the stretcher in the back, and within 30 seconds, the baby was out.

“It was very close,” said Chase, adding that Schmiedge “was standing there and put his hands right out . . . Everything was good after that.”

In 15 years on the EMS staff, Schmiedge said this was his first time delivering a baby in the ambulance.

Schmiedge said he’d had a couple of close calls in the past, but had always managed to reach the hospital before the babies arrived. He’d expected a similar outcome this time, he added,

“It was a pretty exciting event for everyone,” he said.

He said paramedics who help deliver a baby are given a souvenir of the occasion by Heartland: a stork pin.

A second EMS unit arrived from Davidson a short time later to provide support. The mother and child were later transported to Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon.

Chase said the circumstances of Owen’s arrival made it challenging to fill out the certificate of live birth. They resorted to using Google Maps to determine the approximate co-ordinates of his place of birth.

Both mother and child are healthy and doing well, and were back at home after a 24-hour stay in the hospital.