Dad delivers baby in Selden parking lot

With his wife about to give birth, Ryan Schulz pulled into a Selden parking lot Tuesday and delivered his daughter, Emma, on the front passenger seat of his SUV, guided by a 911 dispatcher on a cellphone.

It was about 8:30 a.m.

The Selden couple was only 5 miles and about 10 minutes from Stony Brook University Medical Center when Barbara Coniglio-Schulz yelled that Emma wouldn't wait.

"I'm having the baby right now!" she shouted.

Ryan Schulz immediately pulled into the parking lot of the Hawkins Path Elementary School, walked to the other side of the car and called 911. He quickly realized help was not going to arrive soon enough.

"I was panicking," he said. "It was scary, to see your daughter coming out right there, with no one to help you."

His wife was in such pain, she said, "it was all I could think about."

She's a nurse in the intensive care unit at Stony Brook. He's a researcher for OSI Pharmaceuticals in Farmingdale. Despite their backgrounds, the couple said they weren't prepared for Emma's special delivery.

"I don't know anything about babies," Coniglio-Schulz, 34, said later with her daughter, 6 pounds and 15 ounces, safely in her arms at the Stony Brook hospital.

By the time her husband called 911, their daughter was nearly out. Schulz was connected to John Pilger, a dispatcher with Suffolk County emergency services. In 28 years, Pilger said he's seen more emergency births "than I can remember."

Calmly, he guided the 33-year-old father through what remained of Emma's sudden birth in the SUV. Pilger told him to wipe Emma's face and mouth clean.

He told Schulz to clear Emma's airway of any fluid. Almost immediately, Emma cried.

Pilger told him to tie off the umbilical cord with a string. Schulz took the shoelace out of his right sneaker.

"He was amazingly calm," Pilger said. "He was one of those callers I like to have. He followed directions to a T."

About three minutes after the 8:33 a.m. call, Selden Fire Department paramedics Curtis Waxenberg and Michael Ozer arrived. One tried to make Coniglio-Schulz laugh. Another replaced the shoelace with a clamp and cut the umbilical cord. He then wrapped Emma in a blanket.

"I have to give mom and dad kudos," said Peter Reimann, assistant chief with the Selden Fire Department. "I was amazed. For as unusual as the circumstances were, it went as smooth as smooth can be."

Seven years earlier, when her son, Chris, was born, Coniglio-Schulz's labor lasted about 10 hours, so she figured Emma would arrive sometime Tuesday afternoon.

She felt her first contractions about 5 a.m. They were only five minutes apart, but so mild she mistook them for indigestion. When they persisted, she called the hospital but determined she had plenty of time. She packed a small bag with clothes, her iPad, and a newspaper to read during what she expected would be a long wait.

At 8:15 a.m., the Schulzes put Chris on his school bus. As Coniglio-Schulz stood in the doorway of her house, preparing to leave, her water broke.

"It was totally surreal," she said of the experience. "It seems like a dream, like I can't believe it really happened. I'm still in shock."