At first blush, Fremont resident Alana Sanders had an easy delivery: one push and out came a 9-pound, 4-ounce boy.
But there were a couple of major complications.
Sanders gave birth to Joseph while standing up in her bathroom, and the only people around to help were her three children, ages 2, 9 and 11.
“There was so much going through my mind,” Sanders said of seeing her newborn, who landed on his back on the floor. “Was he breathing? Was he OK?”
Sanders breathed a sigh of relief when she heard Joseph let out a little scream. She then turned her thoughts to slightly less pressing matters: “Where are the paramedics? Why isn’t my husband here yet?”
But it turned out she was in good hands with her two oldest children.
With their mother giving orders, 11-year-old Faith called her father to come home from his early morning paper route in Livermore, and 9-year-old Jabari called 911 to get an ambulance.
“They didn’t freak out; they didn’t fight with each other,” Sanders said. “Even my 2-year-old was calm.”
Joseph was born at 2:45 a.m. March 9, fewer than 10 minutes after Jabari called 911. The operator told Sanders to wrap her baby in a towel, get in bed and wait for paramedics.
But Faith’s job wasn’t over.
The umbilical cord snapped during delivery, but Joseph still had nearly a foot of it attached to him.
Faith, following the 911 operator’s instructions, found some yarn in the bedroom and loosely tied off the slimy cord to prevent Joseph from losing blood.
“I was afraid if I tied it tight something (bad) was going to happen,” Faith said.
Jabari was in the bathroom with his mother when Joseph was born. “It was kind of scary and kind of weird,” he said. “I was just standing there waiting to do something.”
Within minutes, the paramedics, Geoffrey Sanders and his mother arrived, and Alana Sanders was taken to St. Rose Hospital in Hayward, where her newborn got a clean bill of health.
Just a few days before Sanders gave birth, her doctor told her the baby was up high in the womb and that she shouldn’t expect to go into labor for about a week, she said.
On the night she gave birth, Sanders started feeling pains she first thought were constipation. With her kids calling for help, she thought she needed to use the bathroom only to realize she was about to deliver her fourth — and she said her final — child.
“It’s still not real to me that I gave birth to my baby in my bathroom,” she said. “I’m just very grateful that my kids were there.”
Contact Matthew Artz at 510-353-7002. Read his blog at www.ibabuzz.com/tricitybeat.
