Excerpts from MySuburbanLife.com:
Everything happened so fast for Joanna Koppang that she wasn’t able to properly thank the six Lombard firefighters who safely delivered her daughter in an ambulance across from the Lombard Metra station in January, but the Wheaton resident got her chance to do just that on June 18, when she presented the men with a Stork Award.
Koppang and her family awarded the men with the pink stork pin at a Lombard Village Board meeting June 18. Recipients included firefighters Tim Hillesheim, John Studnicka, Dale Farris, Joe Kaforski, Galen Cardott and Lt. Tony Sally.
This was the first time Studnicka delivered a baby, but he said he wasn’t nervous. “Everyone felt comfortable doing it because we have training on labor and birth at least once a year,” he said. “Everything went well; the baby was healthy. So we couldn’t ask for anything different.”
Koppang was at her job in Chicago on Jan. 7 when she started to feel some slight contractions. She decided to take the train home and told her husband to meet her at the Wheaton train station to take her to the hospital in Winfield. But the baby had other plans.
“My water broke near the Elmhurst stop, and my contractions were getting stronger and closer together,” she said. “I was so embarrassed. The train conductor called 911 and told them to be waiting for me at the Lombard stop.”
She was able to get off the train and into the back of the ambulance just in the nick of time.
Once her daughter, her second child, was born without complications, they were able to bypass the emergency room and go straight to the mom and baby unit at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove.
“The doctor checked us both, and we were fine, so after that, it was a normal, standard recovery,” she said. “They were so professional and did a fantastic job. I’m so grateful they were there waiting or else my husband would’ve delivered the baby.”
thanks Dan
