Wasn't False Labor...

[firedoc5]

Jan 30, 10:29 PM EST

Turns Out It Wasn't Just False Labor...

NORWOOD, Ohio (AP) -- A woman who had been told that her pains were false labor pains gave birth in the driveway of her home. Charryse Brooks, 25, had gone to a hospital about 2 a.m. Sunday because she thought she might be in the early stages of labor. She wasn't due with her first child until Feb. 22.

Hospital workers told her she was experiencing false labor and told her to go home. She tried to sleep, but the pain increased and her contractions got stronger.

Finally, she insisted that she had to return to the hospital, but it was too late. By the time she got to the car, the pain was so intense, she couldn't open the car door.

"She looked at me, right in the eye, so calmly, too. She said, 'Tim, the baby's here,'" said her husband, the Rev. Timothy Brooks.

He reached to catch the baby, a 4-pound, 3-ounce girl the couple named Mackenzie Nichole Brooks, in the leg of the sweat pants his wife was wearing.

"It was just so fast," Charryse Brooks said. "It was like 'Boom!'"

Brooks, 26, who had been preparing a sermon for the one-year anniversary of becoming pastor at the Norwood Church of the Nazarene, took his wife and baby, still attached by the umbilical cord, to the hospital. His congregants in this Cincinnati suburb had to do without a sermon.

"They just went ahead and sang," he said.

[Riblett]

I know that sometimes it can be hard to tell the different between Braxton Hicks contractions, or "false labor" and actual labor. From just my own experiences nulliparas have higher instances of false labor, particularly younger ages. Perhaps women who have given birth previously are just able to tell the difference.

I have transported every patient with labor pains, and there have been a lot over the last few years. But there have been patients that I have taken three or more times for false labor before they finally had the baby.