His name is Ibrahim, he weighs three and a half kilos and was born in an ambulance: the story happened last night, near Lagonegro (Potenza). Her mother, a 29-year-old Afghan, was traveling on a bus that left from Lombardy and headed to Sicily, together with her husband and two other children, seven and four years old.
The emergency services, called - according to what was announced by the press office of the Potenza health authority, also responsible for the 118 "Basilicata rescue" service - by the bus driver, arrived near a lay-by on the A2 Mediterranean motorway junction, heading south, between Nemoli and Lagonegro. On board the 'India 4' ambulance, the rescue driver Pietro Falabella and the nurse Pamela Gaeta.
The departure for the nearby hospital of Lagonegro was immediate, but "the baby was in such a hurry to be born that with a very hasty birth he was born in the middle of the night in the hands of the nurse. As soon as he was placed on the stretcher - Gaeta and Falabella - we saw the little head appear. At that point it was a moment: the race to the hospital in just seven minutes and the bus with the family in tow." Despite the linguistic difficulties, the nurse managed to give birth to the woman and she cut the umbilical cord perfectly, "she too received compliments once she arrived at the Lagonegro health facility".
Mother and baby are doing well. For the nurse it was "a unique emotion for having helped a life to be born despite precarious circumstances. It was like reliving the moment of the birth of my two children who are now 19 and 14 years old. So much fear but cool blood prevailed" . As happened to her ten years ago, when she saved an abandoned child in the bathroom of a local shopping centre.