After Daniel Helsel and his colleague were dispatched to help a woman in labor at her home Monday morning, the two firefighters joked about the coincidence of the call landing on his birthday.
Wouldn’t it be funny if Helsel, who was born in the back of an ambulance, wound up delivering a baby on the way to the hospital just as he had come into the world 42 years ago?
It turns out that is exactly what happened minutes after Helsel and his colleagues loaded the mother-to-be in the back of an ambulance heading to Prince George’s Hospital Center.
“As soon as she got in the ambulance, the baby’s head” appeared, Helsel said Monday. “Everything was good with the delivery, albeit in the back of an ambulance.”
Helsel said he was born on the side of the Beltway when his mother was on her way to Holy Cross Hospital in 1975.