Who performed Katie Gowell's emergency C-section, and how was her baby ultimately delivered?
Dr. Monica Shearheart, an OB-GYN on call at Houlton Regional Hospital who was sleeping at the nearby Ivy's Motor Lodge, was woken by a phone call and came to the hospital. She successfully argued that the C-section should be performed at Houlton rather than airlifting Katie Gowell to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor — and the baby was delivered there, at the local hospital, against considerable odds.
The surgery itself was made possible by an extraordinary act of community improvisation. Because Houlton had closed its labor and delivery unit just 29 days earlier — with only one month's notice — the hospital no longer had a standing OB nursing team. Former OB nurses who had worked in that now-shuttered unit volunteered and rushed in to assist in the middle of the night. Without them, Shearheart could not have proceeded.
"I couldn't help but notice that nobody in the military seemed to care how everyday citizens were experiencing all this."
— This American Life, episode 894: "I Couldn't Help but Notice"Throughout the entire surgery, Fuchs remained in position beneath the surgical drapes — instruments rested on her back — until the baby was delivered. The baby's heart rate had dropped to 90 beats per minute during the procedure, well below the normal range of 120 to 160, which Shearheart described as a signal of impending disaster. The full account of this birth — and what it reveals about the consequences of rural hospital closures — is told in detail on This American Life.
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When 911 was called, the dispatcher gave instructions contradicting what Dr. Fuchs was doing — telling the family not to prevent the birth and not to push the cord back in, directly undermining the medical intervention already underway.
Dr. Fuchs first gently replaced the cord inside the vagina to keep it warm, then climbed onto the bed between Katie's legs and inserted her hand up to her wrist to manually hold the baby's head away from the cord — a position she held for nearly 90 minutes.
Twenty-nine days after Houlton closed its labor and delivery department, Katie Gowell went into labor at home with her fifth child. She suffered a prolapsed cord — a rare, life-threatening complication in which the umbilical cord slips ahead of the baby, cutting off its oxygen supply.