Follow @khalid45kk
He was the light at the end of the Holland Tunnel.
A New Jersey couple, aided by a pair of Port Authority workers, welcomed their premature son, Nassim Mohammed Elkarhat, around 7 a.m. Wednesday on the tunnel’s Manhattan side.
Dad Abdel Elkarhat and mom Soukaina Nekhlaoui of Lodi, N.J., were headed to a Brooklyn hospital for Nassim’s sudden delivery when the mom-to-be’s labor pains intensified, a Port Authority spokesman said.
When their black Cadillac reached the Manhattan side of the tunnel, Elkarhat pulled over — and the baby was ready to join the family.
“The father was really frantic,” said PA senior tunnel and bridge officer George McCann, 52, a father of two children — but a rookie at delivering one.
You could tell he was a new father,” McCann continued. “He was running around screaming, ‘Help me! Help me!’”
McCann, a 34-year PA veteran, said the baby — born six weeks early — was blue when he first hit the air.
But the boy’s eyes opened once he was placed on mom’s chest, and McCann and colleague Jean Bernard administered oxygen through a makeshift tent fashioned from a wool blanket.
“We kept the baby stable,” said McCann, who ran over when he spotted Elkarhat pull over just outside the tunnel from New Jersey.
A city EMS crew arrived at the scene to cut the umbilical cord. Both mother and son — whose name means “scent of a morning flower,” were doing well hours later at New York Downtown Hospital.
“It was great,” said Bernard. “The baby looked up, looked at us and was like, ‘Why are you bothering me? I want to go back to sleep.’”
The couple, already the parents of a girl, were headed to Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn — where their first child was born — when Nassim changed their plans.
0 comments:
Post a Comment