The umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck.
Looking Down
<b>A Helping Hand</b><br>
<I>By Gail Cameron Wescott</i><br>
At one o'clock in the morning, five days before Christmas last December, Jennifer Sneed was jolted awake by full-blown labor pains. Her due date was still three weeks away, but the contractions were already coming two minutes apart.</span>
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There was no time to spare. The hospital was in Greenville, North Carolina, 20 miles from home. And it was snowing.
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As Jennifer scrambled to get ready, her husband, Jerry, called to her with further bad news: The snow was coming down hard. "I just looked out the window. There's already four inches on the ground."
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It barely ever snowed in eastern North Carolina. But here was an eerie reminder of another freak snowstorm, almost exactly a year earlier. Two inches had covered the ground when the Sneeds had buried their blond, blue-eyed five-year-old son, Derek, following a horrific car crash.
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Late New Year's Eve morning, while the family was returning from grocery shopping, a car careened across the center line on U.S. 264 and slammed head-on into their Ford Explorer. The car struck with such force that the SUV's passenger-side wheels ended up on the curb.
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The entire family was rushed to the hospital. Jennifer suffered multiple injuries (eight broken ribs, a broken sternum, a bruised kidney), and Jerry fractured his right arm, jaw and eye socket. Eighteen-month-old Kayla, who was snugly belted into her car seat, emerged with only a scratch. But Derek, called DJ, suffered a severe brainstem injury. He was put on life support and died six days later. The Sneeds were devastated.
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In the months that followed, Jennifer, a kindergarten teacher, had been nearly swallowed up by her grief. "DJ had started kindergarten that year and his room was down the hall from mine at school," she says. "Every day, I would look at all the little boys his age and I couldn't help but ask: 'Why DJ?'" His father had called him Monkey because he was such a sunny, giggling little boy. The Sneeds thought they would never recover. Then, in the spring, came some good news:
Jennifer was pregnant again.
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Now the baby was coming. As the Sneeds piled into their Ford Expedition at 1:15 a.m., visibility was approaching zero. "It was a total whiteout," says Jennifer. "You couldn't see five feet." When they got to U.S. 264 -- the same highway where they had tragically lost their son -- theirs was the only car on the road.
"The snow was coming down, and the wind was blowing," Jerry recalls. "I had fog lights on and my head right up to the steering wheel, trying to
peer out." Next to him, Jennifer was screaming. The pains were coming faster. Finally, without being sure where he even was, Jerry stopped in the middle of the highway and called 911 on his cell phone.
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The operator urged him to keep driving until he reached the light at Greenville Boulevard. "NO!" shrieked Jennifer, when he told her. "There's no time! The baby's coming!"
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Dropping the phone, Jerry raced around to the passenger side. Reaching down, he could feel the baby's head. "Okay, push!" he urged Jennifer. Two pushes later, he was able to get his hands around his daughter's tiny neck. "On the third push, I pulled her out," he says. Then things got scarier. The baby was moving but not crying.
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"She looked white and purple, sort of," Jerry remembers. "The umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck." Gently untangling it -- he'd seen the doctor do it when DJ was born -- he took his pinkie and swiped her throat to remove any obstruction. <br><br>
When his daughter cried, he laid her on her mother's chest and covered them with his coat. Both doors were open and snow was fast covering the car. It was 1:42 a.m.
When Jerry picked up his discarded cell phone, the 911 operator was still on the line.
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Like many operators, she had been through medical protocols training. She told him to tie off the cord with a shoelace. He was reaching down to untie his sneaker when, in the distance, he heard a glorious sound: an ambulance siren.
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"Ordinarily it would have taken a good half-hour," says Jennifer, "but they were out on a call that had been canceled and were only three minutes away. There were a lot of miracles that night -- and I felt that DJ, looking down, had a hand in them all." <br><br>
Jennifer and Jerry took their 6-pound, 12-ounce daughter, named Madison Dereka Sneed, home on Christmas Eve.<br><br>
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Should Everyone Read This? Yes! I vote for this story
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