Many doctors have had to come to the rescue during a flight to help a sick or hurt passenger, but Dr. Dale Glenn's in-air episode last week was unlike most. "I've experienced this before, and usually they're pretty clear asking if there is a doctor on board," Glenn says in a Hawaii Pacific Health release of the "fairly urgent" announcement while flying Delta on Wednesday from Salt Lake City to Honolulu. "This call was not like this." What Glenn and three neonatal ICU nurses responded to: a baby being born to Lavinia "Lavi" Mounga, who was 29 weeks pregnant, per WUSA. With the help of Missouri NICU nurses Lani Bamfield, Amanda Beeding, and Mimi Ho, Glenn tapped into his wilderness medical training and patched together makeshift equipment to complete the delivery: shoelaces to cut the baby's umbilical cord, an Apple Watch to monitor his heart rate, and bottles heated up in the plane's microwave to serve as baby warmers.
"We're all trying to work in a very small, confined space in an airplane, which is pretty challenging," Glenn says, per the release. The doctor and nurses rose to that challenge, tending to Mounga and baby Raymond for three hours until the plane landed, at which point EMTs rushed onto the plane and took over. A TikTok video that's since gone viral captures the moment when passengers are told of the birth, per the Washington Post. If you think the other passengers were shocked by arrival of this bonus flier, so was Mounga: She hadn't even known she was pregnant. "This guy just came out of nowhere," she tells KHON. Glenn and the nurses visited Mounga and Raymond at the Kapiolani medical center on Friday; she has since been discharged from the hospital, while little Raymond is "doing great" in the NICU, Glenn says, per the release. "Overwhelmed in the best ways," read a Saturday Twitter post geolocated in Honolulu, from an account that appears to be Mounga's. (More uplifting news stories.)
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