It was 4 a.m. ET on Wednesday when Kenzie Lewellen went into labor at her home in Port Charlotte, Florida, as Hurricane Milton barreled toward the Gulf Coast.
Lewellen and her boyfriend, Dewey Bennett, 24, were both tense.
“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 slammed into Florida.
“My father had a massive heart attack because the ambulance couldn’t get to us during the storm,” he said. With another medical emergency underway, he couldn’t help but remember what happened last time.
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Monster Storm Milton made landfall at 8:30 PM ET on Wednesday, causing massive flooding and leaving millions without power.
Milton had not yet struck, but the couple’s home was already taking on water before Lewellen’s contractions began. Lewellen, a first-time mother, was 39 weeks pregnant, and the couple knew that if she “didn’t start labor before the storm would flood the roads and make it difficult to get” to the birthplace . hospital, Bennett said.
“I just didn’t want to go through what I had to go through during the last hurricane in 2017,” he said.
They had considered evacuating to West Palm Beach on Florida’s east coast. “I’m kind of glad we didn’t do that because I think they ended up with nine tornadoes before the storm even made landfall,” Lewellen said.
“The day before we both called the hospital to see if we could just check in,” she said. “But obviously during a storm they don’t just let people come here because they’re not a shelter.”
After Lewellen had to work four and a half hours at home, the couple began the perilous journey to Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Venice.
“My mom was driving us and it was extremely windy, so we tried to be as careful as possible,” Lewellen said. “There weren’t 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 to the hospital. So Lewellen had to say goodbye to her mother.
“I was very angry that my mother 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 whole time.”
Her distance from her mother only increased the worries in her mind. “My mother and my aunt are very capable of taking care of themselves.” Still, “I had a lot of hope that everything would be good for them,” she said.
She gave birth in a room with a window overlooking the devastation the hurricane unleashed as it pounded Sarasota.
Bennett was by her side.
“I said to him, ‘Oh, that tree looks like it’s going to fly out of the ground!’ when I was in labor, because we just watched the storm, the wind and the rain. It was definitely intense there last night.” she said.
“And it was indeed uprooting,” Bennett added.
After hours of labor, Lewellen received disturbing news: the baby was in the wrong position and she would need a C-section.
“I had so much going on in my mind at that moment, a storm and my family,” she said in an interview via Zoom on Thursday.
Problems with the epidural left her in extreme pain for hours until she was put under anesthesia.
“I was just alone, alone, and I was very scared. “If I didn’t have the doctors and nurses that I had, it would have been much worse,” she said.
In a statement Thursday, David Verinder, CEO of Sarasota Memorial Health Care System, said: “We couldn’t be more proud of our team. They left their homes and many left their families to be here for our patients and the community.”
Along with Kenzie and Dewey’s son, six other babies were born at the two Sarasota Memorial hospitals in Milton, Verinder said.
It was all worth it in the end.
At 11:45 PM ET, Dewey Lester Bennett, IV, was born, a healthy 6-pound boy.
Lewellen held Dewey for the first time and felt her world change. “It’s the most indescribable feeling. He is a part of you and also a part of the person you love.
Bennett said: “My cheeks hurt because I haven’t stopped smiling. It was great.”
Holding little Dewey in his arms also had special resonance for Bennett, given the death of his father, Dewey’s namesake, in similar circumstances.
Years from now, what will baby Dewey’s parents tell him about how he came into the world?
“I’m probably going to give him a hard time because he’s so stubborn,” Lewellen joked. Some people joked that his nickname should be Milton, she said.
“He’s a miracle baby,” she said, holding him up as the sun shone through the hospital window.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
