Three doctors are being celebrated as heroes after they helped a pregnant teenager and delivered her baby girl in Mexican airspace.
Abigail Amoretti, 17, boarded Avianca El Salvador flight TA450 at Augusto C. Sandino International Airport in Managua, Nicaragua and was traveling to Miami International Airport when the pilot diverted the airplane to Cancún International Airport on Thursday.
Dr. Raquel Rodríguez, also of Nicaragua, sprang into action when she heard Amoretti, who was seven months pregnant, moaning in pain as she was in the restroom with her aunt while the airplane was 33,000 feet in the air.
Rodríguez, according to Nuevo Radio Ya, had blankets spread across the isle and had Amoretti lay on the floor. She then lowered her pants and noticed that baby’s umbilical cord was hanging out of the womb.
Abigail Amoretti is escorted on a wheelchair in Cancún, Mexico, after she gave birth to a baby girl on an Avianca El Salvador flight that was headed from Managua, Nicaragua to Miami on Thursday. Her child was not breathing at first, was given CPR for about three minutes and then let out a cry about two minutes later
Dr. Raquel Rodríguez hold the premature baby who she and two other doctors helped delivered on an Avianca El Salvador flight last Thursday. She and another doctor performed CPR on the girl for about three minutes because she did’t have vital signs when she was pulled out of her 17-year-old mother’s womb. Both baby and mother are not recovering
A paramedic carries the newborn daughter of 17-year-old Nicaraguan national, Abigail Amoretti
She was not seeing the baby’s head and put her hands through the teenager’s vagina and learned that the newborn’s feet were near it.
‘The girl started to push, I started to give her directions on how she should push because she was pushing wrong since she was a first timer,’ Rodríguez told the outlet.
Rodríguez was then approached by Dr. Suamy Bermúdez, a Honduran national, who offered to help.
Since she is dermatologist, Bermúdez took over the breech birth and took out the baby by her feet.
‘When the girl came out, she was completely limp and cyanotic, that is, she was purple from the suffering of all the time that the (mother) had been enduring the pain and the contractions,’ Rodríguez said.
‘When the doctor takes the girl out, the girl gets stuck by the umbilical (cord). That was the hardest part. The doctor had to look for maneuvers to remove the head.’
A baby girl was delivered aboard an Avianca El Salvador flight on Thursday
Dr. Suamy Bermúdez (left), a Honduran national, and Dr. Raquel Rodríguez (right), of Nicaragua, where two of the three doctors who helped deliver the premature baby of a 17-year-old girl on a flight
Abigail Amoretti was traveling from Nicaragua to Miami on Thursday when the airplane was diverted to Mexico as she was going into labor
The doctors noticed the baby didn’t have vital signals and Rodríguez immediately practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save her life and one of the two doctors massaged her heart.
She noticed the child was beginning to breathe on her own when she noticed movement on her chest.
Rodríguez shouted that the baby was alive and five minutes later she let out her first cries.
‘When the girl was pink and was breathing on her own and making movement with her little mouth, we had to separate the placenta,’ Rodríguez said.
Rodríguez said continuing the flight to Miami was not an option because they were more than an hour away. Cancún as 40 minutes out. They encountered a storm on the way there, but made it without any problems.
She remained by the side of the baby and her mother until paramedics entered the aircraft to have them rushed to a Cancún General Hospital and were said to be in stable condition.
Video footage show passengers cheering on the mother as the was pushed down the isle in a wheelchair while a paramedic carried the baby girl, who was wrapped in an emergency blanket.
Amoretti took to Facebook on Sunday to say her daughter was a ‘little delicate’ and to thank her well wishers.
‘Thank you very much to all those people who have prayed and have placed me and my girl in the hands of God, thank God I am fine,’ she wrote. ‘The girl is a little delicate but for God there is nothing impossible, he has been taking care of us and with the help of God I will soon come out of this process that is so hard on my life.’
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