Mom, baby happy and healthy after birth at convenience store

Kayla Robinson laughed as she held her week-old daughter, Zion Elise, outside the Zip Trip gas station on U.S. 93 on Thursday morning. “It’s weird” standing by the pumps, she said. “I don’t think of it as a gas station, I think of it as a delivery room.”

For a crazy 10 minutes on March 1, the corner of the Zip Trip parking lot was, in fact, a delivery room. It was a chaotic scene that Thursday afternoon when the baby girl arrived — 6 pounds, 1 ounce — in the backseat of a Mitsubishi SUV.

To be clear: this was not part of the plan. Zion was supposed to arrive via water birth. She was supposed to greet the world in a controlled setting under the supervision of midwife Honey Newton and her team at North Valley Hospital. Even on the morning of March 1, everything seemed to be proceeding smoothly.

Kayla, a resident of Kalispell, visited Newton that morning; she was 2 centimeters dilated but labor was not imminent. Everything looked good.

But Kayla’s twin brother was in town that weekend, and Kayla wanted him to have the chance to meet his niece. So, unbeknownst to Newton, she took some castor oil, a vegetable oil that works as a natural laxative and can induce contractions in pregnant women.

It can also dangerously stress the baby and rush labor. “That was just a bad decision,” Kayla said of the castor oil. “Google led me wrong on that.”

Kayla’s contractions escalated quickly. It took just an hour and a half for her to feel the baby coming imminently. Krystle Oftedahl, Newton’s office manager and doula at Heart and Hands Midwifery and Women’s Health in Kalispell, told Kayla by phone that she needed to get to North Valley Hospital, where Newton has medical privileges, immediately.

Kayla climbed into the back of her stepmother, Victoria Robinson’s, SUV. She was pushing Zion by the time they passed Smith’s on East Idaho Street.

“I was just terrified,” she said, “I was so scared because (Newton) said we needed to get to the hospital and that we could potentially, depending on if (Zion) was stressed, have to do a C-section. So that’s all that I kept thinking: ‘We’re not going to make it. What if ... we’re not going to make it.’”

Newton told Victoria to pull over wherever she could; she would call 911 and meet them there. She grabbed a field birth emergency kit from her office closet — a lesson learned after she delivered a baby outside the Montana Club two years ago — and rushed out the door.

Victoria, meanwhile, pulled her car into the Zip Trip parking lot. Newton was there minutes later and found Kayla in the back of the car, screaming.

“I kept telling Honey, I can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. She just said, ‘We need to get the baby out of you. This is serious.’ There was no playtime,” said Kayla.

Newton counters that “Kayla was so strong and she stayed very present, very level-headed the whole time.”

Zion was born about 10 minutes into the pit stop at the Zip Trip. Mother and baby were spared any major complications, though Zion arrived stressed and covered in meconium, requiring Newton to resuscitate her. She was also susceptible to cold shock due to the outdoor temperatures, but luckily, Oftedahl arrived with a perfectly timed and “invaluable” Star Wars blanket. Paramedics — some recently trained by Newton for field births — also joined the makeshift delivery room within minutes. Shortly after birth, Kayla and Zion were transported via ambulance to North Valley Hospital.

“All things considered, it couldn’t have turned out better and we’re so grateful,” said Newton. “I’m so grateful that I have a super great support staff here who don’t even blink when I say ‘grab a birth kit and run!’”

This is the third time Newton has assisted in a field birth. Though everything went smoothly this time, “I don’t want to make a habit of it,” she said.

For Kayla, the adrenaline has given way to shock and gratitude. “You always think ‘what if?’ because you hear it happens,” she said, “...Of course you don’t think it’s going to happen to you.”

A week out, both mother and daughter are doing well. Zion has joined her 4-year-old brother, Zaiden, at home, along with a card of well wishes from the employees of the Zip Trip that Kayla will never look at the same.

“I just laugh every time I drive by,” she said, “that’s a part of my life now.”

Reporter Adrian Horton can be reached at 758-4439 or at ahorton@dailyinterlake.com