Pop quiz, Nick Hexum. Your wife's gone into labor and the mid-wife is nowhere in sight! What's a rocker dad to do?
311 rocker Nick Hexum and wife Nikki had decided to have a home birth for their second daughter -- they just weren't planning for Nick to deliver the baby all on his own!
Lucky for the whole family, Nick Hexum kept his cool when Nikki went into labor early. All was going well until the baby, a girl they named Maxine, became lodged in the birth canal.
"After Max’s head popped out, the delivery stalled for the next couple of contractions. The baby’s head was blue and the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck," Nick Hexum tells People. "I was worried the cord was choking her, keeping blood from getting to her brain."
Nick thought back to their first daughter Echo's birth 21 months ago, and began to coax the baby out.
"I knew from observing and listening the first time around that sometimes the baby’s shoulder would get caught and they would have to reach in there and break its collar bone to free her," he says. "I reached my fingers in there and felt the shoulders and rotated the baby back and forth."
From there Nick Hexum says Maxine "slid out smoothly." He recalls, "I jiggled her around until I heard a 'wahhh!' It was an amazing moment."
The mid-wife who the couple had intended to assist in their daughter's birth arrived 10 minutes later, just in time to cut the cord. "Everything was fine!" says Nick, who shared this picture of Maxine when she was three days old on his Twitter page. "We never went to the hospital. We just sat in bed laughing and crying tears of joy about what a crazy experience it was."
What an amazing story! A round of applause for 311's Nick Hexum for delivering his own daughter!
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