MDA paramedic from Eilat delivers baby in Haiti

Romeo never dreamed the third time he would help a woman give birth would be in faraway Port-au-Prince.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Romeo, a Magen David Adom paramedic usually stationed in Eilat, never dreamed the third time he would help a woman give birth would be in faraway Haiti.
Following an 18-hour shift with the Magen David Adom delegation at the Notre Dame Hospital in Port-au-Prince this week, Romeo was preparing to leave when another hospital nearby asked for help with a woman who required a Caesarean section.
A doctor asked the MDA team to transport the woman to an operating room, since the head of the baby boy was already visible.
Romeo described how, as the ambulance sped up the dirt roads, “the baby came out, all blue.”
“I stopped the ambulance and we finished delivery, slowly, in minutes and seconds that seemed like an eternity,” he said. “I saw how his color changed to pink and he burst out crying and started to move. I breathed a sigh of relief as he cried. I put him on his mother’s tummy with the umbilical chord still linking them. We cut the umbilical in the O.R.”
Romeo said that the mother, for whom this was the fourth child, remained aloof most of the time, but would smile every time she saw him.
“It makes me happy, to have helped bring new life into grief-stricken Haiti,” Romeo said.