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Premature Birth Creates Fireworks In Tampa Home

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Giovanni Perez was born today at his parents' home, three weeks early.

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By GEORGE H. NEWMAN | The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 4, 2008

Mother and baby are fine, but the father is still a bit shook up after their fourth child was born, this one on the living room carpet, in their Palencia Apartments home.

The Independence Day baby boy, Giovanni Perez, was born at about 3 a.m. Friday morning after the mother completed her bath and was preparing to dry herself off.

The parents, David and Susana Perez, and their 5 pound, 9 ounce baby, were all resting comfortably later in the day at St. Joseph's Women's Hospital. The parents spoke later in the day about their July 4 baby.

"The way he came couldn't have been a greater explosion than that," Susana Perez said. "I thought it was just false labor.

"It seemed like it all happened in 60 seconds," David Perez said. "Susana was having minor pains. But we've been through it before and we didn't think much of it."

David and Susana Perez have three other children, all boys, ages 9, 7 and 3. They live on Palencia Drive in a development of the same name.

"The 3-year-old slept through the whole thing," the father said.

The older children are out of state on vacation, the mother said.

"After my wife got out of the bath her water broke and when I walked into the living room she was just laying on the carpet in the living room and the baby was coming," Perez said. "I put a pillow under her head, grabbed some towels and the baby was born [on a Tampa Bay Buccaneer blanket] just like that. POOF!"

After grabbing some more towels and ripping a shoestring out of the first pair of shoes he could find Perez called 911.

Perez, 29, informed the dispatcher that his wife had just given birth, but the placenta would not come out. After being assured by the dispatcher, Gordon Silver, a veteran with 23 other child deliveries to his credit, that the placenta would come out on its own, the two men began discussing the state of the mother and child.

"I was so nervous I was sweating like a boxer," David Perez said. "I was like Wow! Oh my God! My wife was having the baby."

Silver talked Perez through the procedure of wiping down the child's nose and face, tying off the umbilical cord, and monitoring both mother and child.

Susana Perez, 28, was quite calm, and could be heard on the 911 tape asking whether the paramedics were on the way. Perez watched out the window and gave the dispatcher directions when the paramedics' vehicle entered his neighborhood.

"I think everyone can react better when you don't have time to think about it," said Susana Perez from the hospital.

She held her new baby in her arms, wrapped warmly in a hospital baby blanket.

"That was our fireworks," she said.

"That was like a mortar," her husband said. "We don't need any more fireworks."

Reporter George H. Newman can be reached at (813) 865-4451 or at gnewman@tampatrib.com.

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