Not even nine months of preparation can truly ready a mother-to-be for the potential unpredictability of childbirth. After already having five kids, Jesica Hogan may have thought she knew what to expect, but the location of her delivery ended up being quite a surprise.
While Hogan managed to make it to the hospital mid-labour, she didn’t quite make it to the delivery room. The mother-of-six gave birth to her only son in a hospital hallway and her birth photographer managed to capture the dramatic moments of the incredible delivery.
Jesica Hogan, from Riley, Kansas, and her husband Travis went to Via Christi Hospital after she first started experiencing contractions. However, they returned home after the contractions continued for several days and she still wasn’t going into labour.
Hogan began to lose faith in her ability to tell when she was going to go into labour and started to grow weary that she wouldn’t make it to the hospital in time. However, her contractions increased and she immediately knew that she was going to give birth. After her water broke, it became a race against time to make it to the hospital, but Jesica didn’t quite make it to the finish line.
Jesica’s birth photographer, Tammi Karin, managed to arrive at the hospital just in time to help her and Travis alert the ER front desk. “I made it just past the second set of automatic doors, into the next hall which luckily was not carpeted like the one we had just stepped out of,” Hogan wrote of her experience, according to The Sun. “I know at this point I said something to the effect of, ‘Oh god, he’s here.’”
Little Leapling Photography
At that moment, Jesica could feel her baby’s head crowning with her hand. She knew right away that she was giving birth right then and there. Jesica wrote in a blog post, “I looked at my husband and said, ‘Travis, catch him!’ Without any hesitation, he did just that as I felt my body involuntarily pushing his head the rest of the way out.”
Nurses came rushing to help Jesica who was already lying down in the hospital corridor. “With one more push as instructed by the nurse, and the only intentional push I gave, I felt the rest of his body come out,” Jesica told Little Leapling Photography.
Jesica gave birth to her son Max just a few feet inside the entrance of the emergency room and less than 25 minutes from the time her water broke at home. Despite the rapid delivery, both Jesica and her newborn fared wonderfully.
“I was still a bit in shock from it all,” Hogan wrote in her blog. “I was also totally in love with the little person laying on me, and even more completely in love with my husband who didn’t miss a beat and kept his word that we would, in fact, make it to the hospital. Even if it was only a few steps inside!”
“It was my craziest birth, but also, the most perfect. It was not at all what I had planned, but it ended without any intervention, with a healthy baby, and amazing support from people by our sides. It was beautiful and I’ll forever love every memory of it,” Jessica concluded.
