A Pregnant Doctor Jumped In To Deliver Someone Else's Baby — While She Was In Labor

Amanda Hess may have been in the hospital preparing to deliver her own baby, but that didn't stop her from jumping in to help deliver a fellow patient's baby when she heard that the on-call doctor was out of the building.

Hess, a Kentucky OB-GYN, was being induced at Frankfort Regional Hospital last week when she overheard fellow mom-to-be Leah Halliday-Johnson preparing to deliver. According to NBC News, the on-call physician had been on the way to the hospital, but Hess knew that there was no time to waste.

“I just put on another gown to cover up my backside and put on some boots over my shoes, to keep from getting any fluid and all that stuff on me, and went down to her room and I knew her," Dr. Hess told local station WKYT.

Dr. Hess recognized Halliday-Johnson as a patient she had previously seen, though she wasn't exclusively Halliday-Johnson's doctor.

Halliday-Johnson told People that she had only been dilated by 1 centimeter when she reached the hospital, but her fourth child soon began to arrive faster than expected — with the umbilical cord wrapped loosely around her neck. The nurses on the scene had cautioned her not to push before the on-call doctor arrived, but that proved difficult.

"I was not being quiet about the fact that it was difficult for me not to push," she told People.

Halliday-Johnson also didn't realize that Dr. Hess was in labor herself when she arrived to help: "She was definitely in doctor mode," she told NBC News. "My husband noticed something was going on because she had on a hospital gown, but I didn't notice that because I was on the delivery table. I was in my own world there."

Dr. Hess ended up helping Halliday-Johnson deliver a baby girl after "two quick pushes," according to People.

"I appreciate what she did for my family, and it speaks a lot to who she is as a woman and a mother as well as a doctor," Halliday-Johnson told NBC News. "It makes you feel better, bringing a baby girl into the world, knowing there are women like her willing to step up like that."

Welcome to Mothership: Parenting stories you actually want to read, whether you're thinking about or passing on kids, from egg-freezing to taking home baby and beyond. Because motherhood is a big if — not when — and it's time we talked about it that way.