Two weeks before Analysia Beck’s due date of Jan. 25, she started having contractions in the middle of the night.
By 2:30 that morning, the contractions were so strong that she woke up her husband, Daniel. “‘This is real, we have to go,’ ” she told him. “I was on the floor on all fours and started screaming.”
At 3:50 a.m., the young couple from Muskego, Wisconsin, hopped in their SUV and headed to the hospital, just as it began to snow heavily.
“My husband was going very, very fast,” Analysia, 26, recalls. “I mean, he flew. But probably two minutes after we left, I was like, ’We’re not going to make it.’ ”
They pulled into the parking lot at their local McDonald’s — the same one they had taken their two other children to many times before. “I felt like I was sitting on the baby’s head by the time we got there,” says the stay-at-home mom.
By then, her husband had become overwhelmed with worry. “I thought I was going to throw up because I was so nervous something was going terribly wrong,” says Daniel, 27, a food and beverage analyst. “My wife was panicking for sure. This feeling was a lot different than what she had with either of our other kids. I was definitely scared.”
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Analysia jumped out of the car and went to the trunk of their Ford Edge, minutes before paramedics arrived.
“We had to keep the trunk door open, obviously, the whole time,” she says. “So I was laying in the trunk, just getting snowed on. Freezing cold. It was the worst snowstorm we had all winter.”
Thomas Malak, 32, an advanced EMT and firefighter with the neighboring Hales Corners Fire Department, was one of the paramedics on the scene. “Let’s try to get you into an ambulance,” he told her. “But there was no time,” he tells PEOPLE. “She was having contractions, screaming and had no pain medicine. So I said, ‘If we are going to do this, let’s do this.’ ”
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Malak guided Analysia through labor and after six pushes, she gave birth to a 8-lb., 6-oz. baby boy with a head of reddish-brown hair. “I was the catcher,” Malak says.”I was guiding the head as it came out.”
Though the infant was completely blue and purple at first, and barely breathing due to the snow and cold, Analysia says, he quickly warmed up in the ambulance.
“The baby responded pretty quickly,” Malak says. “His color started coming back pretty quickly. It was really cool. I drove to the hospital, heard the baby cry and everything was good.”
“It was probably one of the most positive, memorable moments I ever had,” he says. “It was a really special way to help my community out.”
Now nearly 6 months old, little Micah is thriving, eating and sleeping a lot — and proving to be very adaptable.
“He is definitely the easiest of my three babies,” says his mom. “I guess he had to learn pretty young.”
