Girl, EMT Who Delivered Her Meet after Nearly 2 Years

WILDWOOD – Jessica Martin was three weeks away from her baby’s due date when her water broke just past midnight June 29, 2016.
It was her second child, she said, so she knew what labor felt like.
“The night before, I felt like I was sitting on a ball,” she said. “I was not ready.”
She called 911 at 12:36 a.m., and within a minute, paramedics from Wildwood Fire Department arrived at her home a few blocks away.
When firefighters Mathew Long and Krystle Hill arrived, they were surprised to see Martin on the verge of giving birth.
“You’d be surprised how many times we get called for maternity, and…they think it’s happening, but it’s not happening,” Long said. “I could tell she was in more distress than most people.”
The firefighters tried to bring in a stretcher but it wouldn’t fit through the door, so they assisted her into the ambulance.
Long and Hill helped Martin remove her clothes and saw that her water had broken and she was crowning. (During delivery, the baby’s head begins to show through the vaginal opening with each contraction. When the baby’s head remains visible without slipping back in, it is known as crowning.) It was a rapid birth, Long said.
“She’s yelling at me, and I’m yelling at her,” Long said. “You can’t help but keep coaching her, even though she’s yelling at you that she can’t.”
In the ambulance at 12:45 a.m., Martin gave a complication-free birth to a girl weighing five pounds. She was named Marissa.
“From the time she crowned to the time the baby was delivered, it was probably all of four minutes,” Long said.
On the way to the hospital, Marissa started to turn blue, so Long took the oxygen mask off Martin and put it on the baby. Then they realized she was blue because she was bruised from the quick birth.
“She bounced me around like a ping-pong ball,” Martin said. “She had what we called ‘purple eyeshadow’ for weeks.”
Martin and Marissa rested at Cape Regional Medical Center in Court House for three days. Marissa was perfectly healthy, Martin said. Long brought Marissa a firefighter doll during their stay.
This June 21, days before Marissa’s second birthday, Martin brought her daughter to the firehouse to reunite with the firefighter who delivered her. Long hadn’t seen Marissa since she was born.
Marissa clutched the firefighter doll when she met Long.
“Remember me?” Long asked Marissa. “You probably don’t. We had an intense 20 minutes together, though.”
Martin warned Long that the toddler was shy.
Marissa cried at first when Long held her, but she soon smiled and let him toss her into the air.
The fire department still uses the ambulance in which Marissa was born, but it was in the shop during her visit.
Marissa was the first birth Long witnessed or performed. Long had learned how to deliver babies when he trained as an emergency medical technician.
“If it wasn’t for him, who knows,” Martin said. “There could’ve been complications.”
In September, Long’s wife will give birth to their first child.
“We don’t always have awesome days here where we deliver a kid,” Long said. “A day when you deliver a kid like Marissa, that basically makes it all worth it.”
To contact Taylor Henry, email thenry@cmcherald.com.