Kayla Thompson and her husband, Kasey Thompson, were asleep in their RV camper at their first Burning Man festival Wednesday morning when she awoke in pain. She thought it might be something she ate, or worse, her appendix.
The rain had stopped, but the desert playa that stretched infinitely around their camper was mucky and filled with puddles from a storm that had pummeled the Southwest. Kayla Thompson’s cramping was unrelenting. The couple knew they needed medical help, but they did not anticipate what would happen next: Minutes later, Kayla Thompson was giving birth to their first child, a 3-pound, 9-ounce baby girl, in the bathroom of their camper.
The couple had not been planning for a child and had no idea that Kayla Thompson was pregnant.
“Even the nurses at the hospital were like, ‘You don’t look like you were pregnant at all,’” Kayla Thompson, 37, who works in medical billing, said, adding, “I didn’t have any symptoms.”
After she delivered the baby, her husband ran out of the RV and desperately called for help, he said. “I was yelling for anyone to come help us,” Kasey Thompson, 39, who lays tiles, recalled through tears.
Within minutes, a neonatal care nurse, a pediatric doctor and an OB-GYN, among other festival attendees from nearby camps, filled their camper. The man who identified himself as an OB-GYN was wearing nothing but his underwear as he helped Kayla Thompson deliver the placenta.
“This should not be happening this way,” Kasey Thompson recalled thinking. He raced around in search of supplies and relied on the community of Burners, many of them strangers from nearby camps, as he and his wife experienced some of the scariest moments of their lives. Had it been an hour earlier or an hour later, he estimated, the couple would have been stranded at the camp because of the weather.
The Thompsons, who are from Salt Lake City, were among thousands of people who had arrived this week in Black Rock City, a temporary community that pops up each year in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, a driving distance of about 120 miles northeast of Reno, Nevada, for the arts and culture festival. They had originally planned to camp in the back of their truck, but Kasey Thompson’s older brother, Jesten, who had attended before, warned them about the desert’s harsh elements and bought a recreational vehicle for them all to stay in together.
As soon as the Thompsons and their crew arrived last Saturday to set up, they were hit with the severe conditions. A seasonal monsoon moving through the area disrupted the opening weekend for the event, which has drawn some 70,000 people in recent years. Dust storms, gusty winds and rains toppled tents, created whiteout conditions, mucked up the desert and briefly shut entry gates.
But things took a more serious turn Wednesday morning, when Kayla Thompson woke her husband because of her severe pain. Kasey Thompson quickly went to use a portable toilet, and on his way back, his brother met him at the door. “You need to get back there,” he remembered Jesten saying to him. He ran into the camper’s bathroom and could tell from the look on his wife’s face that something was wrong.
Kasey Thompson searched for help.
Maureen O’Reilly, a 61-year-old nurse from the Bay Area with experience in neonatal critical care, was sitting at her camp next door when she heard about the baby. She immediately taped garbage bags around her shoes to trudge across the mud to the Thompsons’ RV.
O’Reilly said that she arrived just as the umbilical cord was being cut. She introduced herself as a nurse and immediately placed the infant on her stomach to provide warmth. Her mind raced as she sat with the small newborn, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but her own body and an old towel to take care of her, she said.
“The hardest part was knowing, as a nurse, what can go wrong,” O’Reilly said. She added, “Having no resources was frightening.”
O’Reilly asked the campers to turn on the heat as she examined the baby’s mouth and airways, checked her coloring and her posture and monitored her breathing. The baby was small, O’Reilly said, but she had pink coloring and was crying and breathing well, all good signs. Campers found a heated water bottle to help keep the baby warm. O’Reilly recalled soothing the newborn, saying, “Come on, baby. It’s OK.”
About 10 to 15 minutes after Kasey Thompson first yelled for help from the RV, the Black Rock Rangers, a group of event volunteers, arrived in an SUV with a medical team, Thompson said. The playa’s terrain was too difficult for ambulances to navigate.
The medics drove the baby to a medical tent, and the Thompsons, along with the OB-GYN in his underwear, followed behind in the back of a random pickup truck, Kasey Thompson said. Once at the tent, the couple were told there was only enough room for the baby to be airlifted to a hospital. Kasey Thompson needed to make a choice: stay with his child and ensure she got on the Life Flight helicopter, or leave right then to ride with his wife in the ambulance to the hospital in Reno.
“That was the hardest decision of my life,” he said, crying over the phone. A doctor in the tent assured Thompson that he would get the baby on the flight, and urged him to go with his wife, he said.
It took them an hour and a half to get off the playa because of the roads, and another two hours from the main road to the hospital in Reno, Kasey Thompson said.
When they arrived, Kayla Thompson was rushed to a room, and Kasey Thompson, wearing his dust-covered Burner clothes, ran to see his daughter in the neonatal intensive care unit. “She was safe and sound, and I was so thrilled,” he said through tears over the phone. She weighed 3 pounds, 9.6 ounces, and was 16.5 inches long.
The couple were discharged from the hospital Thursday, Kasey Thompson said. They are staying at a hotel in Reno, while their daughter is gaining her strength in the NICU. All of their belongings are on the playa or back home in Salt Lake City. Lacey Paxman, Kasey Thompson’s sister, started a GoFundMe to help cover medical, lodging and travel expenses as they stay with their daughter and hopefully transfer her to Salt Lake City.
“Their world has just been flipped upside down completely,” Paxman said. She and her parents rushed from Utah to be with them.
As scary as the ordeal was, Kasey Thompson said that he was grateful for the Burners who rushed in to help him and his wife. “That’s what that community is about,” he said. “They will always have such a special place in my heart.”
Thompson said he and his wife planned to make it back to Black Rock City again one day. Next time, they’ll plan the trip with their daughter.
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