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Canadian doctor delivers ‘miracle baby’ on flight


Published : 15 Jan 2022 10:27 PM | Updated : 16 Jan 2022 03:20 PM

A Canadian doctor helped deliver a baby during an overnight flight from Qatar to Uganda last month.

Dr Aisha Khatib volunteered to help when the call came on a Qatar Airways flight on Dec 5, asking if there were any doctors on board.

"I see a crowd of people gathered around the patient," she told the BBC News on Saturday (Jan 15). She initially thought someone had suffered a heart attack.

However, as she got closer, she saw that it was a woman - a migrant worker travelling home from Saudi Arabia - who was about to deliver her child.

"I saw this woman - she was lying with her head towards the aisle and her feet towards the window and the baby was coming," she told CTV News.

Without hesitation, she quickly helped the woman to give birth. Dr Khatib was also assisted by two other passengers, a paediatrician from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and an oncology nurse.

The baby girl, who came early at 35 weeks, was born healthy. The baby's mother decided to name her firstborn Miracle Aisha, after the doctor.

"So I was like, 'Congratulations it's a girl.' Then the entire plane started clapping and cheering and I was like 'Oh right, I'm on a plane and everybody is watching this,'" the BBC quoted Dr Khatib as saying.

"The best part of the story is that she decided to name the baby after me."

She said she gave the baby a gold necklace that she was wearing, which has the name Aisha written in Arabic.

"I thought I'd give it to her and she'll have a little token of the doctor that delivered her 35,000 feet in the air while flying over the Nile."

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