A child born inside a San Antonio-area Chick-Fil-A this week may very well be spending a lot of time in this establishment as she gets older.
Allow us to explain…
On Tuesday night, a woman named Falon Griffin started to feel intense contractions and therefore headed to University Hospital with her husband, Robert.
Prior to their arrival, though, the couple met a family friend in the parking lot of a Chick-Fil-A in order to drop off their two oldest daughters while Falon went and gave birth.
But the mother-to-be felt a strong urge to use the bathroom there, knocking on the door of the closed restaurant and convincing an employee to let her in.
“I didn’t know I was going to have a baby in there! I was going to the restroom,” Falon said afterward to KSAT-TV.
Indeed, not long after entering the stall, Falon knew she wasn’t going to make it to the hospital.
Her baby girl was on the way!
“I’m about to dial 911, I open the door and she’s just screaming,” said Brenda Enriquez, the Chick-Fil-A store director who was on the premises at the time.
Enriquez proceeded to grab some towels, scream for Robert Griffin and tell him to go to work. He’d have to deliver his own child.
“I looked at her and said, ‘We’re going to do it right here, right now,"” Robert said.
Falon said her and her baby, who the couple named Gracelyn, were considered high-risk throughout her pregnancy. So she was understandably nervous.
“I’m in excruciating pain. He’s not skilled. I don’t know what’s about to happen right now. I don’t know if she’s going to come out alive,” Falon recounts of her feelings during labor.
Robert, however, was up for the task… and then some.
Not only did he deliver his third kid safely, he did so after a very scary moment that could have resulted in her death.
“I stopped her at her shoulders because I saw what looked to be a white collar around her neck, and it was the cord that had been wrapped around her neck twice,” Robert says.
Yet he managed to successfully unwrap it and bring his daughter into the world in one, healthy piece.
“All I cared about at the end of the day was the baby was breathing, and by the time they [first responders] arrived, she was pink, thankfully for those blankets for keeping her warm,” Falon says.
EMS arrived about 10 minutes after Gracelyn was born and transported mother and baby to the hospital.
But that isn’t where this amazing story ends, not quite.
Gracelyn will now have Chick-Fil-A for life, the chain has announed, at no cost — and she’s guaranteed her first job at age 14!
The franchise owners are already helping plan her first birthday party at their restaurant as well.
Talk about a lucky little nugget!
