Hospitals deliver expectant father
Injured dad attends birth in wheelchair
When Edward Warren’s wife called him crying at 2 a. m. Friday to tell him she was going into labor, he told her he would walk her through it on the phone.
It was the only option, he said.
Warren, a Buffalo firefighter, had been in an Erie County Medical Center bed himself for two weeks after having suffered third-degree burns battling an East Side house fire.
But Jennifer Field, Colleen Warren’s midwife at Mercy Hospital, would have none of it. And three hours, several contractions and a flurry of interhospital phone calls later, Edward Warren watched the birth of his first son from a wheelchair in the delivery room.
“I definitely had people there with me,” said Colleen Warren, 32. “But for him to miss this would have just been heartbreaking. It’s not right if he’s not there . . . this is the birth of our only child.”
Born two weeks before his July 9 due date, Gavin Warren came home Sunday afternoon weighing 8 pounds, 2 ounces. But his family appears just as excited that his dad was able to watch his birth as they are about the birth itself.
Gavin’s unusual birthday story started when Edward Warren burned his shins in a fire on Shepard Street earlier this month. Still waiting for his legs to heal from a skin graft operation June 21, the West Seneca native couldn’t walk, much less leave ECMC.
When the staff at Mercy heard about Colleen Warren’s plight, they talked to the nurses at ECMC, who then conferred with Edward Warren’s doctors. By 5 a. m., he had been temporarily transferred to his wife’s hospital room.
ECMC doctors sent Edward Warren home Friday, a day early. Colleen Warren said she was told there was no medical risk in the transfer, something her husband said he is grateful for.
“After being there, there’s no way she would have [settled for holding] a phone in there,” Warren said.
His wife couldn’t agree more.
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