Troy Campbell and Erika Campbell were only 10 minutes away from the hospital on Monday, May 10, when Erika began going into labor on the highway.
“You gotta push? What do you mean you gotta push?” he said to her, his voice rising in a now-viral dashcam video clip of the entire experience
The couple’s third child, Nova Marie, was not anxious to make her appearance known!
“At one point I shook my head, and that’s when I realized this baby is coming in the car,” Erika admitted to CBC News last Wednesday. “To deliver on the side of the highway, it’s very, very scary.”
Erika revealed that her water had broken that afternoon, but she was not feeling much pain. And while both of her previous children had been delivered fairly quickly, and she had been informed this one would likely as well — she wasn’t expecting things to “speed up as fast as [they] did.”
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While the clip began with both parents calmy joking about middle names — tensions rise as Erika’s contractions speed up.
“I’ve gotta push,” she exclaims at one point while gripping onto the edge of the truck’s sunroof. “No no, you can’t push, babe,” Troy urges.
“I’m trying to hold it in,” she states amid the contractions. Erika then tells her husband to call their midwife ASAP.
Not too long after, their midwife instructs Troy to pull over and call 911. “I’m having a baby on the 407,” Erika cries out to the dispatcher as soon as she gets ahold of them.
During the simultaneous phone calls, Troy jumps out of the truck and opens the passenger side door.
“I can see the baby’s head. The baby’s head is out,” he tells the dispatcher. “It’s almost out. Tell me what to do, please.”
And just like that — the baby is born, but not before 20 seconds of complete silence. Once Nova Marie begins to cry, you can feel the parents breathe of sigh of relief.
“How is mom doing?” the dispatcher asks. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Erika responds.
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“When she was first placed on my chest, the first thought was, ‘She needs to cry,'” Erika revealed to CBC News. “When she cried was when I felt finally that relief of, ‘Oh my god, this baby is here … this is amazing.'”
It wasn’t long until an ambulance arrived and the family was taken to hospital, where both mom and baby were checked out and were deemed a-okay.
Towards the end of the video, while holding his new daughter, Troy tells the camera that he’s “slowly coming out of shock a little bit, because I just delivered the baby on the side of a highway.”
“Well, I delivered the baby,” Erika corrects the seasoned dad. “He caught it.”
To which Troy responds: “OK, you did all the work.”
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