Parents Sent Home Hours Before Dad Delivers Baby
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The Fertility Institutes has already received half a dozen requests for the service and expects the first designer baby to be born next year.
Ricardo Basilio was a nervous wreck on Wednesday afternoon as his wife, Erica, was screaming on a bed giving birth in their Vista home.
The baby's arrival was unexpected -- sort of. Earlier in the day, Ricardo said, the couple had gone to a hospital after Erica went into labor. Two hours after they came home, though, the baby wasn't waiting any longer.
In the end, Ricardo called a CHP dispatcher named Christy Tuck, who talked him -- and Erica -- through the delivery. Tuck used prepared cards that helped her walk Ricardo through the birth. Using the birth cards was a first for Tuck, too, who, while it may not be obvious from the 911 recording, said she was nervous also.
"It's very rare -- you don't do that very often," the 11-year veteran emergency operator said Thursday. "You get the same 'difficulty breathing,' 'chest pains,' people falling, vomiting. You get used to it. You [similar] cards every day."
In the end, Tuck told Ricardo to use a shoestring to tie off the umbilical cord -- something he had seem on TV -- and now he finally has a daughter to go with his two sons.
Ricardo said Thursday that Erica and baby Joanna Basilio -- who weighed 6 pounds at birth -- are both doing fine.
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