At 4:06 a.m. on April 17, Cortez dispatcher Marissa Hurst picked up a 911 call.
“911, what’s you emergency?” Hurst asked the caller.
“I’m having a baby,” the caller quickly said. “And it is coming right now.”
The caller was at a local motel, and he quickly explained that his wife had been having contractions all day but was sent home because her labor was not progressing, according to a 911 recording.
Hurst quickly dispatched medics and the fire department to the Cortez Econo Lodge on Main Street.
“They are on the way,” Hurst stated, after pausing to call medics.
“Sir, are you ready to deliver the baby if needed?”
The male voice answers in a distressed voice, “I don’t know how, I don’t know what I am doing.”
Hurst, did her best to calm him down.
“I’ll give you some instructions. I’ll tell you what to do, OK?” she said.
“OK,” the man said on the other line.
It is a call that Hurst, a dispatcher for a year, thinks about several weeks later.
“When I got the call, I knew right away that I had to get the ambulance and fire department there as soon as possible,” Hurst said.
Hurst, a mother of a 20-month-old and a 7-year-old, also knew she had to calm the father of the baby down.
“I knew the best thing for the mother was to have a calm father,” she said.
Hurst then prepared the father to deliver the baby.
“Be prepared. If that baby starts coming, you need to have those towels ready,” Hurst told the caller.
Hurst continued to prepare the father to deliver the baby and had the mother concentrate on breathing.
“I’m going to stay on the phone with you until they are up in the room with her OK,” Hurst told the caller.
The call lasted seven minutes.
Once the medics arrived, the father was relieved.
“I’m going to let you go. You’re doing a great job and congratulations,” Hurst said right before hanging up.
Hurst said her training kicked in quickly.
“The calmer the dispatcher is, the better the situation,” she said.
When the call ended, Hurst continued to monitor the situation.
“I heard them say, ‘Transporting two,’ and I knew she had the baby,” Hurst said.
The woman had the baby with the help of medics in the motel room about 25 minutes after the medics arrived.
“I figured she wasn’t going to make it to the hospital,” Hurst said.
To this day, however, Hurst doesn’t know who she helped out that early morning.
“I don’t event know if it was a boy or girl,” Hurst said.