Woman gives birth in hospital parking lot

Posted: Friday, September 9, 2011 9:15 am

Woman gives birth in hospital parking lot By Andy Malby, editor The Belgrade News | 0 comments

She wasn't due for more than two weeks, so when Amelia Doll began having light contractions Tuesday night, Sept. 6, she didn't think much of it. Within 45 minutes, though, in a parking lot at a Fargo, N.D., hospital, she became a mom.

Doll, formerly Amelia Felz, is a 2005 graduate of Three Forks High School who now lives in Fargo. She was expecting her first child Sept. 23. The kid had other plans.

“I was having contractions but they weren’t anything,” she said. “I worked until 7 o’clock that day; I was just tying things up at work in case I did go into labor.”

At around 11:15 p.m., her contractions started coming more frequently, and still she didn’t think it was anything to be overly concerned about, she said.

“They told me labor was very painful and I thought, ‘I can’t be in labor; this doesn’t hurt at all. I’m not due for 17 days,’” she said.

“Fast forward 45 minutes and something isn’t quite right,” Doll’s husband, Zach, wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

The couple headed out the door for Fargo’s Innovis Health hospital as Amelia’s contractions became worse, Zach wrote. By the time they reached the parking lot, the baby was on its way.

According to the blog, in which Zach refers to himself in third person:

“…he pulls into a parking spot after Amelia said, ‘No Zach, go up to the front, this baby is coming.’ Zach says, ‘it will be fine’ and pulls into the parking spot and says, ‘ok, lets go!’ Amelia informs Zach she cannot walk and the baby’s head is out. He doesn’t believe her and comes around to her side of the car to see for himself. Once he feels the head he understands the urgency and runs to grab a wheelchair.

“Within what seemed like seconds to Amelia, Zach is back at the car and helping her get into the wheelchair. Within the same action of standing up Amelia feels the rest of her baby come out and catches him with her hands and pants and tries to sit down. … Luckily Zach was quick and got the chair pushed under Amelia and took off at a dead sprint for the ER.”

Amelia said Thursday the hospital, though surprised as she was, took it from there.

“That’s not something that happens very often,” she said. “When I was wheeled in there with a baby in my arms they didn’t quite know what to do because that’s just not something that happens. It was definitely a surprise.”

William was born shortly after midnight Wednesday, and both mother and son are doing well, she noted.

“I had a very normal pregnancy; there were no health problems or anything and no discussion of me going into pre-term labor,” she said. “So when this happened everybody was kind of like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’”

Editor's Note: Amelia is the daughter of Bruce and Cathe Felz of Three Forks.