‘We all just teared up’: Kansas City area nurses recount in-flight delivery en route to Hawaii
Three NICU nurses from North Kansas City Hospital recounted their experience helping to deliver an unexpected baby on board a flight to Hawaii last week.
The women were on a Delta flight Wednesday from Salt Lake City, en route to Hawaii for a girls trip when they heard someone calling for help, nurse Lani Bamfield said, according to a news release from Hawaii Pacific Health, which included interviews with the mother and medical staff.
Bamfield went to the back of the plane and saw a woman holding a baby in the airplane bathroom.
“Mimi there’s a baby, and it’s little,” Bamfield, said she shouted to her friend and colleague, Mimi Ho.
While Bamfield and Ho cared for the baby, born at just 29 weeks, their other friend and colleague, Amanda Beeding, helped the mother deliver the placenta. All three are trained to care for premature or ill babies needing intensive care.
A doctor was also on the plane. Hawai‘i Pacific Health Family Medicine Physician Dale Glenn joined the women and helped stabilize the baby.
“I don’t know how a patient gets so lucky as to have three neonatal intensive care nurses onboard the same flight when she is in emergency labor, but that was the situation we were in,” Glenn said. “The great thing about this was the teamwork. Everybody jumped in together and everyone helped out.
For three hours they kept the baby stabilized while suspended over the Pacific Ocean without any of the usual equipment in a delivery room.
They used shoelaces to tie and cut the baby’s umbilical cord, tracked the baby’s heart rate using an Apple watch and warmed the baby up using bottles that they microwaved, Glenn said.
“This guy just came out of nowhere,” said the mother, Lavinia “Lavi” Mounga, who said she didn’t know she was pregnant when she boarded the plane alongside her parents, siblings and other family members for a Hawaiian vacation.
She expressed gratitude toward the onboard medical staff.
“If they weren’t there, I don’t think he would be here,” said Mounga, who is from Orem, Utah.
Glenn said the baby began to stabilize as they got closer to land. By the time they touched down, and the mother and child were being wheeled down the aisle, the baby, later named Raymond, finally began to cry.
News of the high altitude delivery was also shared widely on social media.
In a video shared on TikTok, which had more than 8 million views as of Friday, the pilot can be heard announcing that a baby was just born on the aircraft. He called for a “nice round of applause for the mother.”
On Friday, the birth team reunited with Mounga and Raymond at Kapi‘olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, where they said Raymond will likely remain in the NICU until he reaches full term.
“We all just teared up,” Ho said after they were gifted colorful leis, standing beside the new mother. “She called us family and said we’re all his aunties, and it was so great to see them.”
“We’re very emotionally invested in this little man,” Beeding added.
This story was originally published May 3, 2021 at 2:27 PM.
