999 baby
At one point I had vision of burly blokes up and down the country sitting in their cars, vans and lorries sobbing as they listened to Victoria Derbyshire's show on Five Live yesterday.
In front of me was a screen filling up with text message after text message:
"I'm a 49 yr old man with 2 grown up kids and I'm weeping like a soppy idiot; I have just tuned in half way thru. I cant stop crying now; Hello. I'm a 6ft. Geordie rugby player - harder than a coffin nail. I'm in tears. Image destroyed in front of 2 mates; I'm a hardened 38 year old copper in absolute tears at home."
I've never seen such an immediate and overwhelming reaction to a piece of audio on a programme. The Five Live listeners were reacting to an extraordinary 999 tape. It's the story of Jacob Hickman's birth and how his dad, Leo, delivered him at home with help on the phone from a London ambulance 999 operator, Katie Vallis.
Leo's wife Jane went into labour and the midwife was stuck in traffic. So we heard Katie talking Leo through the whole thing, including some scary moments when the baby appeared still in the birth sac and had to be freed with the help of a safety pin.
We played eight minutes of it with Jane and Leo listening in the studio. Baby Leo snoozed through most of it. We all looked a bit tearful.
It was an amazing listen. Not just because it was a privilege to hear Jacob's first cry but because of the awe-inspiring professionalism of the 999 operator and dad Leo's pretty cool handling of it all.
My colleague Katie Kernan had spotted the of the call in The Guardian and saw how it could become a great radio listen. London ambulance and the Hickman family agreed to let us broadcast the tape. We decided to reunite Leo and Jane with Katie Vallis, the 999 operator they only knew as CAC1821.
Twenty years old, and cool as a cucumber, Katie told us this was her first baby delivery and how she used autocards on screen to guide them through the birth. Job done, a healthy baby, all very matter of fact. But you have to hear it to understand the impact. All of us who heard it were either in tears or just stunned!
Have a listen (here). It was scary, uncomfortable, raw. It was primeval, intimate, exhilarating, and just bloody brilliant!
I think we're all grateful to the people involved for letting us share Jacob's birth. Quite simply it was joyful - and that is something you can wait a long time to hear in life, let alone on your radio.
Comments
I agree - it was brilliant, and I also found the initial article in the Guardian very moving.
What would be great is if this could be used to focus on the importance of the Ambulance Service, but also on the importance of midwives [even if one wasn't required on this occasion!] in the Health Service.
I was reading in another paper a week or two ago about the scandalous shortage of trained midwives, and the risk this exposes mums and babies too.
This slot on Victoria Derbyshire was very moving, because it reminded us all how precious and fragile life is, and that at its start nothing can be taken for granted. Let us hope that the politicians are listening, and are resolved to make midwifery and maternity a priority, and not a poor relation to the Health Service, as not all stories end as happily as this one.
I saw this on News 24 last night. They mentioned towards the end that this apparently happens several times a week. It seems this is only 'news' because Leo Hickman is a journalist so had easy access to get his story covered in his newspaper, and now the 91Èȱ¬ have picked it up.
What I really didn't like about the 91Èȱ¬ News 24 story was that they simply didn't mention the fact he was a journalist and that was why this was 'newsworthy' where the thousands of births performed in this way prior to this one were not. Without wanting to trigger some sort of Blue Peter cat-style outcry, it felt a bit like a misleading omission to me.
While the item was very moving it shows the additional strain placed on the NHS by the now fashionable desire for home births, a practice that women of previous generations were glad to replace with hospital births.
Here we had a midwife using up time in travelling to the home, reducing her availability to other mothers-to be. An operator had to spend her time assisting the couple, at what cost to other callers? And if anything had gone wrong an ambulance would have to have been sent. What about the mothers-to-be who for various reasons cannot have a home birth? Will they be offered a less good service because of the number of midwives attending home births? What other part of the NHS is there such one to one care? Should extra resources be devoted to additional midwives when there is a more efficient and cost effective way of deploying the existing work force.
What a lot of nonsense, but only to be expected from our dumbed down 91Èȱ¬. This event was 5 months old and, so the 91Èȱ¬ Ten reporter said, happens every week. Total coincidence that the father was a Grauniad journo and knew Fiona Bruce?
Self-indulgent filler - was Europe closed for the day?
Further to my earlier post, let us hope that this sheds light on the challenges faced by maternity provision up and down the country, highlighted in these articles.
This is a problem which needs addressing now, to ensure that as many parents as possible get a 'happy ending', even if it doesn't involve quite the level of drama the Hickman's experienced.
What twaddle. Good luck to the family and all that, but really, it's an everyday event and hardly worth all this fuss. As for "6ft rugby player, hard as a coffin nail, in tears". Hilarious, but really quite pitiful. Have all the adults suddenly vanished?