FREELANCES need to be versatile; freelance writer, Jane Hamilton, had to be more versatile than most: by the side of a road, she had to help deliver a baby.
Hamilton, who was almost five years the crime correspondent at the Sunday Mail and, four years before that, the crime reporter at the Edinburgh Evening News, was taking her heavily pregnant cousin to hospital last week, when her passenger declared she couldn’t wait any longer.
So, at least ten miles from the hospital and by the side of the road, Hamilton – who worked also at the Scottish Sun for a year until last year – had to become a temporary midwife.
Of course, she called 999, and while the ambulance crew was making its way to her, she was being talked through the procedure by a nurse on the other end of the telephone.
“So, there I am, on a freezing cold night, with a screaming woman in my passenger seat in the middle of one of the busiest roads in Edinburgh and she’s about to deliver a baby.
“The nurse talked me through it and even though it was damn scary and my knees were knocking together, a wee head appeared down below. ‘Get back in’, I was chanting. Help arrived in the shape of two ambulances and two cop cars, just in time.”
She continued: “The ambulance got a police escort to the hospital and the baby was fine. The funniest thing was my passenger seat window got broken in the melee and on the way home I noticed a pair of undies, pyjama bottoms, slippers and, yuk, loads of blood on my passenger seat. I swear, if I’d got stopped on the way home by the cops, they’d have been searching the boot of the car.”
Both the mother and baby are said to be fine.
