Mom delivers her own baby, alone in a hotel room...with a little help from YouTube videos
A woman from Nashville, Tennessee delivered her own baby in a hotel room in Turkey with the help of YouTube videos, and used shoelaces to cut the umbilical cord!
Tia Freeman, a member of the United States Air Force, narrated the incredible tale of her delivery one tweet at a time and kept the twitterati at the edge of their seats till the end of the story.
Freeman reportedly decided to take a trip to Germany in early March despite being nearly at the end of her term. The 22-year-old told BuzzFeed that she had booked the tickets for the trip even before she was aware that she had gotten pregnant. She said that she came to know about her pregnancy in her third trimester.
"I was in shock. I never saw myself as a mom before. I was more career-oriented. That’s probably why I was in denial after finding out," she told HuffPost.
So she decided to take the 14-hour flight to Istanbul, Turkey on March 7. She had an overnight layover in Turkey en route to Germany.
It was then when she began feeling sick and thought she had food poisoning after eating an in-flight meal. When she was at the airport in Istanbul, then she realized that it could be something else entirely.
When Freeman reached her hotel room, she began looking for videos on YouTube about how to deliver your own baby and began the procedure.
She reportedly used two towels, one to wrap the baby in and the other one to bite onto when she gave birth. She also filled the bathtub with warm water and began pushing when her contractions were a minute further.
Freeman said that after a few pushes the baby "popped out" and floated on to the water. She then looked for measures to sever the umbilical cord and ultimately took her shoe strings sterilized them by boiling and then used them as clamps.
She did not visit the hospital even after all this and cleaned the bathroom instead because "it looked like the set of a horror movie" and then went to bed with her son.
Freeman said that there were multiple reasons why she did not want to go to the hospital for the delivery.
When she reached the airport the next day, there was a lot of confusion about the newborn.
“They thought I was a human trafficker trying to smuggle out a baby,” Freeman wrote on Twitter.
She and her son were then examined and her story turned out to be true. The 22-year-old said that the airport staff was very nice to her then and even helped her name her baby Xavier Ata.
"The ladies at the airport who helped me said that he should have a Turkish name. So I asked them for a cute boy name and they suggested Ata," Freeman said.