Havre police dispatcher helps deliver baby

During her four-year tenure as a dispatcher for the Havre Police Department, Nichole Anderson, 25, had never had to help deliver a baby - until Saturday.

In a long-standing tradition of dispatchers, fellow dispatcher Brenda Kadrmas presented Anderson with a baby girl stork pin Tuesday after she came on shift.

Kadrmas said in her 12 years of dispatching, this is the first delivery by a dispatcher she has seen.

Saturday morning, between 5 and 6, just before she was scheduled to get off her night shift and go home for the day, Anderson said she was notified that a vehicle carrying a woman in labor was speeding from Chinook to Northern Montana Hospital and asked that Havre officers refrain from stopping it, should they see it.

"If we saw their vehicle traveling pretty quick, they had a reason," Anderson said of the notice.

Anderson dispatched the ambulance Satruday to intercept the vehicle, but it soon became apparent the couple wasn't going to make it. She said she received another call shortly after, this time from the driver of the speeding vehicle. The vehicle had stopped just outside of Havre on Pork Chop Hill.

"They said, 'We're not going to make it - we need an ambulance,'" she said. "The baby was crowning."

Anderson turned in her dispatcher handbook to the baby-delivering section and said she began reading instructions.

She said the mother was in a position in which she couldn't couldn't lay on her back, so she had to deliver the baby where she was.

"She screamed a few times. I could hear her saying a few times that her water broke," Anderson said. "She did so well - I was really proud of her. It was just a couple of pushes and it seemed the baby was out."

She read instructions on cradling the baby's head, and once it was out, wiping the face clean, instructions to wrap the baby in a blanket, and warnings for no one to cut the umbilical cord because it would risk complications.

The ambulance showed up right after a healthy, 8-pound girl was successfully delivered.

Anderson said the phone call couldn't have lasted for more than six minutes. After getting off the phone, she said, she "freaked out." Although she kept calm during the call,  she said it took some time for her hands to stop shaking afterward.

"I had to get up and walk around for a little while," she said. "It was pretty crazy. I was not expecting that."

While some co-workers have said they always wanted to help deliver a baby, she said that's never been her.

"I've always been really nervous that I was going to get a baby call like that - and I've been really close twice. This one, luckily, was pretty easy. They both knew what they were doing," she said of the parents, who already had children. "I think I'm the first, out of all four dispatchers that had to deliver a baby."

Anderson, who doesn't have any children or medical training, said she likes being a dispatcher because she gets to talk to and help people.

"This is one I won't forget for sure," she said, before laughingly adding, "First sign of labor, I'm going to the hospital. I do not want to deliver a baby on the side of the road."