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Florida Lady Gives Birth During Hurricane Ian: A pregnant lady in Florida who went into labor during Hurricane Ian drove through severe winds and water to reach the hospital.
Early on Wednesday morning, 22-year-old Hanna-Kay Williams of Melbourne, Florida (approximately 70 miles southeast of Orlando) began experiencing contractions. The neighborhood was already feeling the effects of the impending hurricane, which included heavy winds and rain.
Williams said she was about to go into labor, so she, her fiance, and her mother braved the stormy roads to get to Health First’s Holmes Regional Medical Center.
“The contractions really started around 2 a.m., so that’s when we made the decision to go to the hospital,” Williams said. My fiancee is an excellent driver, so I didn’t have to worry even though the car swayed in the wind and the rain was really heavy.
Despite their early Wednesday morning arrival at the hospital, Williams’ birth was slow in coming. After more than 20 hours of labor, she gave birth while Ian pounded the state’s central region with rain and gusts of 40 mph.
Williams wasn’t fully dilated, and there were indicators of fetal distress (the fetus’s heart rate changing or showing other symptoms of oxygen deprivation before or during labor) so doctors felt an emergency C-section was necessary.
A natural delivery was “not going to be an easy sail,” she added, because “it was pretty evident my cervix was not totally dilated.” It was upsetting after all the hard physical effort that had been put in before that, but I knew I had to do what was best for myself and my kid.
At 10:11 p.m. ET, Williams gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Wajiha through C-section. She weighed 7 pounds 13 ounces and was 20 inches long. According to her, the name’s dual meaning of “beautiful lady” and “glorious” is what attracted her to it.
She remarked, “I’m going to give my fiancé all the credit for the name.” “We set out on a quest to discover the most original moniker. That was the one he chose. It’s a match made in heaven every time we gaze at her or speak her name these days.”
The mother expressed her and her family’s gratitude that Wajiha is doing well despite the ordeal of labor and the bad weather.
Williams declared triumphantly in a press release, “We came out on top, we absolutely did.” Despite already having a fraternal twin, “I felt when she arrived and they laid her on my lap, the first thing I said was, ‘That’s a large baby, and then I looked at her and thought, ‘That’s my twin.'”
She also credits the nurses and doctors for helping her remain composed during the ordeal.
She said, “I don’t think I would have made it through labor as quietly as I did without them.
After wreaking havoc on the southern coast, Hurricane Ian headed towards central Florida, where it brought devastating flooding that forced rescuers to save people from their houses, automobiles, and even nursing homes.
Orlando received 12.5 inches of rain in 24 hours, a new record. About 50 miles to the northwest of Florida, at a place called New Smyrna Beach, 28.60 inches of rain poured in just 27 hours.
Central Florida is facing “a 500-year flood event,” Governor Ron DeSantis declared during a press conference on Thursday morning.
It’s Friday afternoon, and almost 2 million Floridians, including over 600,000 in Central Florida, are without electricity.
