Saturday, October 12, 2024 - A couple from Florida, USA are ecstatic after their child was born amidst the disastrous hurricane Milton .
Kenzie Lewellen and her boyfriend, Dewey Bennett, 24, were
both on edge at 4 a.m. on Wednesday this week when her labor began at her
home in Port Charlotte, Florida, with Hurricane Milton hurtling toward the Gulf
Coast.
“My mind was just running a million miles an hour, like,
what am I going to do?” said Lewellen, 22. “I was very nervous.”
Bennett, the baby’s father, said in an interview Thursday,
“I was very stressed.”
In 2017, Bennett’s own father, also named Dewey, died when
Hurricane Irma hit Florida.
“My dad had a massive heart attack because the ambulance
could not come out to us during the storm,” he said.
Hurricane Milton made landfall at 8:30 p.m. ET Wednesday,
causing massive flooding and leaving millions without power.
Even though massive destruction hadn’t occurred yet, the
couple’s house was already taking in water before Lewellen’s contractions
began.
Lewellen, a first-time mom, was 39 weeks pregnant, and the
couple knew that if she “didn’t start having contractions until during the
storm the roads would have been flooded and we were going to have a tough time
getting” to the hospital, Bennett said.
“I just didn’t want to go through what I had to go through
with the last hurricane back in 2017,” he said.
They had considered moving to West Palm Beach on the east
coast of Florida. “I’m kind of glad we didn’t, because they ended up getting, I
think, nine tornadoes before the storm had even made landfall,” Lewellen said.
“The day before, we were both calling the hospital and
seeing if there was any way we can just check in,” she said. “But obviously
during a storm, they don’t just let people come stay here, because they’re not
a shelter.”
After Lewellen labored for 4½ hours at home, the couple
traveled to Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Venice.
“My mom was driving us, and it was extremely windy, so we
were trying to be as cautious as possible,” Lewellen said. “There was not
really many people on the roads, because it was so windy outside and it was
raining quite a bit.”
When they arrived, only one person could accompany her
inside the hospital. So, Lewellen had to say goodbye to her mother.
“I was very, very upset that my mom couldn’t stay, because she is my best friend and one of my biggest supporters,” she said. But “we were able to FaceTime pretty much the entire time.”
“My mom and my aunt, they are extremely capable of taking
care of themselves.” But, still, “I was very hopeful that everything would be
OK for them,” she said.
She went through labor in a room with a window view of the
devastation the hurricane unleashed as it pounded Sarasota but her man Bennett
was by her side.
“I was telling him, I’m like, ‘Oh, that tree looks like it’s
going to fly out of the ground!’ when I was laboring, because we were just
watching the storm and the wind and the rain go crazy. It was definitely
intense out there last night.” she said.
“And it actually did uproot,” Bennett added.
After having been in labor for hours, the doctor told
Lewellen the baby was in the wrong position, and she would need a cesarean
section.
“I had so much going through my head at that point, a storm
and my family,” she said in an interview over Zoom Thursday.
“I was just on my own, by myself, and I was very scared. If
I didn’t have the doctors and the nurses that I had, it would have been a whole
lot worse,” she said.
In a statement Thursday, David Verinder, CEO of Sarasota
Memorial Health Care System, said: “We couldn’t be prouder of our team. They
left their homes and many left their families to be here for our patients and
community.”
Along with Kenzie and Dewey’s little boy, six other babies
were born at the two Sarasota Memorial hospitals during Milton, Verinder said.
At 11:45 p.m, Dewey Lester Bennett, IV, was born, a healthy
8-pound boy.
“It is the most indescribable feeling. He’s a part of you
and also part of the person you love.” Lewellen said.
Bennett said: “My cheeks hurt because I haven’t stopped
smiling. It was great.”
“I’m probably going to give him a hard time for being so
stubborn,” Lewellen joked. Some people have joked that his nickname should be
Milton, she said.
“He is a miracle baby,” she said, holding him up.
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