Last month, an ambulance crew from Clarks Summit Fire Company delivered a baby while on the way to the hospital.
CLARKS SUMMIT, Pa. — Paramedic Patrick Golden was wrapping up his overnight shift in the early morning hours of April 6th when the call came in. A woman in Clarks Summit was going into labor.
Golden and his partner, Megan Kalbarczyk, responded to the home in minutes.
“It was an amazing experience,” said Patrick Golden, Paramedic. “Something I’ll never forget.”
“Yeah, we tried to get to the hospital as fast as we could, but this baby had other plans,” said Sadie Smith, mom. “So we got there as fast as we could, but she was coming faster.”
Kalbarczyk took over from there. She tells us it wasn’t her first delivery, but it had been more than a decade since the last one.
“And on the way to the hospital, she said I need to push and a couple of pushes at that point, and the baby started to show,” recalled Kalbarczyk.
At 5:46 a.m., on the way to the hospital, somewhere in the notch between Clarks Summit and Scranton, little Florence Smith came into the world.
Some six weeks later, Florence came to the Clarks Summit Fire Company to meet the paramedics who were part of her unexpected entrance. For Patrick Golden, it was his first birth on the job. The ambulance now gets its very own stork sticker to mark the accomplishment.
For the Smiths, Florence is their third child, but the first who had no intention of being born at the hospital. For that, Sadie is glad she and husband Wayne had a little help that night.
“He was stressed, so if he’d have been the one to do it, it would have been a completely different scenario,” said Sadie Smith.