Within minutes of her water breaking, Sara Boyette of Canyon Country said she gave birth to her son Mateo in her bathroom Sunday morning.
Luckily for her, the first emergency responder to run through the door, Deputy S. Curameng, not only had emergency medical training as a law enforcement officer, but also nine years of experience working as a pediatric nurse before he took on the badge.
“I didn’t recognize him at first, but it was good to see him,” said Boyette, remembering her reaction when she and the deputy had a reunion on Wednesday.
The Call
At approximately 7:15 in the morning, Curameng and his partner, Deputy D. Delgado, were loading up their gear for the day’s shift when they heard a call for an emergency of a baby just being born at a residence on Vista Del Cañon.
“I acknowledged because I’m the closest unit and in my head I’m like, ‘Cool, I got the experience … I was a pediatric nurse for nine years before I became a deputy five years ago.”
“So, I have some experience with labor delivery, obstetrics, and then obviously with other parts of the pediatric field,” he added.
When he arrived at the home, he found Mateo’s grandparents standing outside. When asked where the baby was, the grandparents reportedly responded, according to Curameng, “What? The baby is born?”
“We run up, Mom’s already got the baby in hand and he’s a little blue,” said Curameng. “My instinct, just because for newborns the first thing you do is you do an Apgar check.”
An Apgar check, according to Curameng, is a scoring system that is a combination of checking a newborn’s vitals, neurological reaction, respiratory and cardiac function.
“It’s a scoring system that you’ve got to give in the first minute of birth, and then you check again in five minutes after to see how the baby is developing,” said Curameng. “And then, obviously, you want to get them dry, keep them warm…Once I made sure the baby was OK, he started getting some color, started kind of pinking up in the head, chest then eventually the outer extremities.”
Curameng said he then checked on Sara, wrapping her after he had wrapped the baby, and made sure she was alright and not having any complications. He then placed the baby on the mother’s chest and then the firefighters began to arrive.
“I kind of saw him, but then there was like 10 other men in the room at the time with like the ambulance and the Fire Department,” said Boyette, who said she was 39 weeks pregnant at the time and had woken up that morning feeling crampy, but that it wasn’t necessarily a contraction.
“I’m cleaning baby off, making sure he’s crying and breathing and getting the lungs all dried out and ready to go for life,” said Curameng. “Eyes open up, he’s reactive, that’s the best sign and I kind of just calm down after that: ‘All right, we’re good.’”
Delgado described his partner, once the firefighters were ready to load mom and newborn into the ambulance, as quickly rattling off the vital medical information to the paramedics without missing a beat.
On Wednesday, Sara, her husband, 2-year-old daughter and Mateo all met once again with Curameng, who brought gifts for the kids.
“I didn’t recognize him at first,” said Sara, when remembering the reunion. “But it was good to see him.”