Labor Day weekend was more laborious for a Davis County dispatcher and jailer than they had anticipated.
Micalle Slack and Niles Bartleson delivered a 10-pound, 1-ounce baby girl Sunday morning in the back seat of a Ford Escort outside the Davis County criminal justice complex."I had the best people there delivering her," said the baby's mother, Julie Garcia, Salt Lake City. "Since I couldn't be at the hospital, I couldn't have asked for a better bunch."
Garcia named the baby Micalle Nilain Olsen after the two who delivered her.
When Garcia's water broke at 7 a.m. at her parents' home in Layton, she told her parents, "We're probably not going to make it," knowing that her babies come fast.
Garcia's father, Brent Olsen, county jailer, called dispatch to have paramedics and officers look for his wife's car en route to LDS Hospital.
Five minutes out of Layton, Garcia could tell the baby was close to arriving.
"I was panicking, and I thought, `Oh great, I'm going to have to deliver this baby by myself,' " Garcia said.Hoping there would be someone at the county complex who knew how to deliver babies, Mary Olsen, Garcia's mother, drove there, parked and pounded on locked doors and windows to get someone's attention. Jailers called dispatchers to tell them about a woman outside whose daughter was having a baby.
That's when Slack ran out of the building to see if she could help.
Slack, a certified emergency medical technician and dispatcher, had seen films on how to deliver a baby - but had never delivered one.
"It's not as easy as it looks in the film, though, when your adrenaline gets going," said Slack, who is seven months pregnant with her second child.
Slack told Garcia to just breathe, don't push and wait for the paramedics, but the baby had ideas of her own.
"The next thing I knew I looked down and the head was half way out and I knew I was going to be it," Slack said.
Surrounded by Farmington and Centerville police and other officers, Slack delivered the head and then yelled to Bartleson, who helped her with the rest of the delivery.
Thirty seconds after the baby was born, paramedics arrived and suctioned the babies mouth, cut her umbilical cord and administered oxygen.
Later Sunday when Slack visited Garcia and the baby at LDS Hospital, she learned that the baby had an irregular heartbeat throughout the pregnancy. Slack said LDS Hospital had made plans with a special team from Primary Children's Hospital to assist with the delivery. The grandparents had bought a burial plot for the unborn child.
"I'm glad I didn't know that then," Slack said. "It's scary enough to deliver a baby out in the middle of nowhere, let alone one that had problems."
Slack, who said she's been smiling for two days, added, "It's real fun to do something like this that's rewarding and you can see the benefit that comes from it. . . . It's things like this that give you such a good feeling.
"It was a real neat experience," she added, "but it was scary as hell."