Thought your return home from the Irma evacuation was bad? Try it pregnant and in labor

There’s a long list of inconvenient places to go into labor.

A Hardeeville gas station is on that list.

But that was reality for Savannah resident Candice Simplis-Paige on Tuesday — a week before her Sept. 19 due date — as she struggled to return home in the miles of traffic after evacuating for Tropical Storm Irma.

The pain started while Simplis-Paige was on the road home from Charlotte where she, her mother and her two children had evacuated. Her husband, Marcus Paige, stayed behind in Savannah to work as a corporal for Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police.

Simplis-Paige’s first two births were a breeze, planned to a T. Labor was induced. Doctors decided on in advance. The hospital selected beforehand.

This time, though, was different.

Simplis-Paige’s mother, 72-year-old Juva Fernandez, gripped the steering wheel of her daughter’s red Chevy Traverse as she made the drive home with her 11-year-old granddaughter in the passenger seat. Fernandez’s 2-year old grandson sat in the back along with her pregnant 37-year-old daughter, whose contractions were increasing, hour by hour.

“(My mom) really was the unsung hero of the trip,” Simplis-Paige said.

With thousands of other evacuees returning home to Florida, Georgia and Beaufort County that day, South Carolina’s interstates were more like parking lots than highways. The normally four-hour, 250-mile trip home spanned eight hours.

There was no stopping. No driving through McDonald’s. No bathroom breaks from the time the group left the Hilton Charlotte University Place Hotel at 9 a.m. until 5:15 p.m. when, finally, Fernandez stopped for fuel.

Neither she nor Simplis-Paige remember precisely which gas station they pulled into. But both were adamant they could make the last 17 miles to Savannah.

Simplis-Paige had even called her husband earlier on the drive.

“Meet me at the ER,” she told him.

Paige drove to their pre-arranged hospital, Candler, only to find it had closed during the storm. The couple talked a second time — she in the backseat of the car, he from his desk office — and they agreed to meet at St. Joseph’s Hospital instead.

“One of the most terrifying things was I didn’t want to give birth by myself,” Simplis-Paige said. “That’s what was driving me to get back to Savannah. We’re planning on this being our last child.”

Back at the gas station, Fernandez mentioned her in-labor daughter to the middle-aged gas station employee. He called Hardeeville police and Simplis-Paige’s hopes soared at the thought of bypassing the traffic gridlock and having a police escort to the hospital instead.

“But once police said the Talmadge Bridge was closed, I lost hope on Savannah,” she said.

Hardeeville police called for an ambulance, along with paramedics who timed Simplis-Paige’s contractions to be just two minutes apart.

Simplis-Paige called her husband from the gas station parking lot with the new plan: delivery at Coastal Carolina Hospital.

There was no time for paperwork nor an epidural. Within 15 minutes, a 7-pound, 14-ounce, 20-inch-long baby girl was born.

Dad arrived half an hour late.

Cassie Clayshulte, of Cassie Clayshulte Photography and a newborn photographer for Coastal Carolina Hospital, snapped the family photos the next day.

The name, Presley Jade Simplis-Paige, was decided on months ago.

Did they consider switching her name to Irma?

“That would be the last thing I’d want to name her,” Simplis-Paige said. “Presley definitely was the silver lining in this whole experience.”

This story was originally published September 14, 2017 at 4:09 PM with the headline "Thought your return home from the Irma evacuation was bad? Try it pregnant and in labor."