A new mother's birthing story is going viral on Twitter after she delivered her own baby in a Turkey hotel room with the help of nothing but a YouTube video.
Tia Freeman of Nashville, Tennessee, was in an Istanbul hotel bathtub during a layover in her travels from the U.S. to Germany in March when she gave birth to Xavier Ata Freeman. The 22-year-old shared her story in a Twitter thread on Tuesday.
Freeman, an analyst for the U.S. Air Force, did not know she was pregnant until she was in her third trimester, because her birth control caused her to not have a menstrual cycle. She went into labor about two weeks ahead of her due date.
Freeman’s contractions began on her flight to Turkey, but she first thought it was food poisoning. By the time Freeman got to the airport, her symptoms had worsened and she started to seriously consider the possibility that she was in labor.
When she got to her hotel room in a country where she didn’t know the language or the emergency number, she looked up videos on YouTube that she hoped would instruct her about how to deliver her baby.
Freeman then got into the bathtub and had a water birth; she used the internet to teach her to cut the umbilical cord. “It was pretty much just me winging it,” Freeman said.
She went back to the airport for help the next day, where employees shuttled her to the U.S. Consulate. The consulate provided a translator and took Freeman to the hospital.
Source: Newsweek