“This was a dramatic experience, but everyone supported me, kept me calm, it was incredible,” Rachael Bonnette, a patient at Women’s Care of Nashua, says after giving birth in an exam room at the practice.
Her new healthy baby boy, Parker Lawson Bonnette, decided he wanted to make a grand entrance into the world.
“On the morning of his due date, I thought I was imagining things when I felt little contractions around 5am. At first, they were 20 to 25 minutes apart. I figured we were far from any sort of delivery, so my husband drove to work, and I hopped on a conference call,” Bonnette says.
The contractions continued and she decided to ask her husband to come home from work. She also asked if her mother-in-law could watch their 4-year-old son.
By 9:22 am, Bonnette had three contractions, five minutes apart, and they were strong. “I called Women’s Care of Nashua and as I was on the phone, the nurse could hear me talk through a contraction. Usually people can’t talk through a contraction. I laugh thinking about it now, but the nurse who was wonderful and said the famous last words, ‘we both know babies don’t just come in an hour, right.’”
Within 20 minutes of that phone call, the contractions got even closer. Bonnette had five contractions, four minutes apart. She called back and the staff at Women’s Care of Nashua told her to come in and to get checked out.
“On the way to the office I had some intense contractions, but they were still four minutes apart. They brought me into an exam room right away. Dr. Martinez-Adorno looked at me and said ‘Rach, you’re like eight to nine centimeters [dilated].’ She yelled out to someone to get a wheelchair to bring me over to the Birth Place. As she helped me get my pants up to go over, my water broke. I looked at her wide-eyed and said, ‘oh my god, the baby is coming’,” Bonnette explains. “Dr. Martinez-Adorno went into super woman mode. It was awesome, she was in complete control. She had someone call 911, somebody called my husband and let him into the exam room, and some additional pieces of equipment were brought in.”
Trying to help keep Rachael calm, Melissa Martinez Adorno, MD, FACOG, Chair of the Division of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Southern New Hampshire Health, added a little humor to the situation, “This was all happening in exam room five. So, I was joking with her saying, ‘there’s a cleanup in room five’, like there’s a cleanup in aisle five.”
As the pain hit Bonnette, she said Dr. Martinez-Adorno talked her through it and told her to focus on pushing. The two nurses that work at Women’s Care of Nashua, Lisa Delagatta, RN, and Alexandra Papatsoris, RN, happen to also have been experienced Labor and Delivery nurses, helped hold her legs, and stay calm.”
“I walked in their door at 10:20 am and, by 10:32 am, Parker was born. As soon as he came out screaming, they put him skin-to-skin with me. The paramedics arrived to take us to the hospital next door. As we came out of the exam room, staff and patients in the waiting room were clapping and cheering me on. It was really so sweet,” Bonnette recalls about the experience.
“It was the first time in the 20-year history of Women’s Care of Nashua that a baby was delivered in our practice. I’ve been doing this a long time and I have never lost that feeling of such privilege to be given an invitation to care for a woman who is giving birth to life. I mean, the ability to take a woman’s most empowered moment and be there to make it a positive and special experience, there’s nothing like it. OBGYN is the unifying factor for so many women. You can be rich, you can be poor, you can be Black, you can be white, but everyone who gives birth goes through a similar experience. For me as a woman of color doing Obstetrics, I take an incredible amount of pride in being able to provide inclusive, diverse, and equitable care to women,” Dr. Martinez-Adorno says.
“I think Southern just does such a wonderful job. It was a crazy experience, but they kept me calm throughout the whole thing. The care I received was incredible,” Bonnette says.
She and baby Parker are doing well.