Strangely, Our Newborn Son's First Drive Was Not In Our Long-Term 2015 Honda Odyssey

“I Drove My Newborn Son Home From The Hospital In A Minivan Like A Real Father Ought To,” the headline was supposed to read. But deliveries, whether of the UPS or child variety, do not always go as expected. As a result, the all-important first drive does not always occur as planned, either.

Nine days ago, with Mrs. Cain one week past due to deliver a new baby boy, she asked her mother about driving over from Prince Edward Island to our Nova Scotia home before, rather than after, the baby was to be born. With Grammie quickly installed in the spare room, Mrs. Cain texted me from elsewhere in GCBC Towers at 2:15 p.m. the next day to say we had to leave for the hospital in her mom’s Hyundai Elantra, leaving our Odyssey with the house’s remaining occupants for child seat and canine purposes.

But that Elantra journey to the local hospital had nothing to do with the vehicle in which the new baby boy would experience his first vehicular experience. We didn’t make it to the local children’s and maternity hospital. But at 3:20, we had a new baby boy whose first drive took place in a Freightliner. No word of a lie.

I remember coming home from school a couple of decades ago and jumping down the stairs to the basement to find my mother watching TLC’s A Baby Story.

It was horrifying.

This baby story is free from gory details.

My wife’s previous delivery occurred quickly; dangerously so for the baby, who was mostly lifeless for nearly half an hour. But I had greater cause for concern this time.

There are two bridges that cross Halifax Harbour from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to Halifax, where the IWK Health Centre is renowned for delivering and caring for children. Major reconstruction on one of those bridges, the Angus L. Macdonald, takes place at night and on weekends.

Last Saturday, the Angus L. Macdonald, the closest span to both our home and the IWK Health Centre, was closed.

Twitter told me that construction — maybe an accident? maybe construction? who on Twitter knows anything? — was creating major backups on the other bridge, the A. Murray MacKay. The only other route, a near hour-long trip from our Eastern Passage home, through Dartmouth, around Bedford, back to Halifax, was never in the running, particularly given the likelihood that we may still run into the MacKay bridge’s traffic.

I approached the logjam with all due haste.

Knowing others who’ve enjoyed police escorts to the IWK, I called 911 not long after leaving our house, explained the likelihood of a rapid arrival, and was fortunately taken seriously.

“Tell me where you are and pull over,” the dispatcher said. “Wait for an ambulance.”

I’m sorry, did you say wait?

Wait?

We talkin’ ’bout waiting?

I drove faster.

After explaining to the dispatcher that I was proceeding toward the MacKay Bridge, that I either wanted a police car to clear the way or an ambulance to meet me closer to the bridge, I was transferred to an ambulance-specific dispatcher. This second dispatcher told me emergency services were struggling to get across the MacKay; that if this baby is coming quickly — and based on the look on my wife’s face and the panic in my own voice, he was — we needed to make our way to a different hospital.

The Dartmouth General Hospital, where I’ve had casts wrapped around broken bones and once seen a nutritionist in a basement office, “delivers babies all the time,” I was told. Get to the Dartmouth General, the dispatcher said, and the LifeFlight helicopter’s accompanying ambulance would be called. A paramedic would arrive with a doctor and nurses from the IWK’s maternity ward who would likely get back to the IWK in time to deliver the little one. Worst case, those same individuals would deliver the baby at the Dartmouth General.

I drove faster.

From the memorable text at 2:15 p.m. to the arrival of little Mr. Cain at 3:20 p.m., the Dartmouth General ER staff proved eminently capable of delivering a baby boy. Do they do it all the time? No, perhaps one or two a year, we were told. Did the LifeFlight/IWK team arrive in time? Not even close. For one thing, they had to clear the way across the same bridge we were told not to cross. Also: this baby was in a hurry to meet the world.

Sure, the delivery was a little more chaotic than it would have been at the IWK. We were in a trauma room. There were six registered nurses, two ER doctors, two medical students, a nurses aid, and a handful of others coming in and out. Some equipment was not readily available. (And why would it be? The IWK, only two miles away from the Dartmouth General as the crow flies, is responsible for delivering babies in this region.)

But the level of calm in the professionals’ voices, the degree of excitement they exhibited after delivering a baby weighing in at 10 pounds and 13 ounces, the round of applause I received (as if I had anything to do with this) when I walked through the ER waiting room less than two hours after initially walking in and announcing to the triage desk that, “This woman is about to have a baby“, the fact that our baby boy brought joy to a typically joyless place — all of that made our highly abnormal birth story a positive experience.

There’s no shortage of it’s-a-small-world appendages to this story of the arrival of another future GoodCarBadCar.net data entry specialist. Some 15 years ago, for example, my wife’s sister was a vital cog in the Dartmouth General’s fundraising efforts that ended in the culmination of a new, larger, better-equipped ER, including the gigantic trauma room that would house all the nurses and doctors “required” for the delivery of our baby boy.

A decade later, my wife was the Emergency Management Office liaison from her two provincial government departments when planning was underway to account for unexpected circumstances associated with the closure of the Macdonald Bridge’s Big Lift project. They dealt with all sorts of catastrophic possibilities, but apparently not the prospect of a mother — one of the mothers in the room at the time — one day being unable to get across the Halifax Harbour when in labor.

The Dartmouth General delivered our newborn baby, but they never asked to keep and monitor him. The LifeFlight team arrived and informed us that mother and baby were traveling in different ambulances to the IWK Health Centre. Uncomfortable though I was at this prospect, they showed me the ambulance: a crew cab Freightliner with three nurses and a paramedic. I felt better.

Jonas would be driven home in the Honda Odyssey a day later. But not before he made his big brother jealous with a 15-minute lights-and-sirens cross-town ride in an ambulance, and no mere ambulance at that.

Not surprisingly, given the Macdonald Bridge’s ever-changing schedule, the paramedic headed straight toward a closed bridge.

By the time the ambulance approached the open MacKay Bridge with lights blazing and sirens blaring, traffic had cleared. Of course.

And in Grammie’s Elantra, I was once again driving faster, chasing our already-delivered little boy to the delivery ward of the IWK Health Centre.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.