Sure, it happens a lot in the movies — but it’s not too often in real life that a pregnant woman dramatically experiences her water breaking in a public place.
But SiriusXM The Highway night host Ania Hammar went into labor in an even more high-stakes scenario: She was live on air.
Hammar was 34 weeks pregnant with her first child when she walked for her regular evening country radio show on Tuesday, Aug. 5. She tells Taste of Country that it started out as a pretty regular day — even though, at 34 weeks pregnant in August in Tennessee, she was dragging a little.
“I was slowing down, I was exhausted, but, you know, still powering through,” she remembers.
A regular subscriber called in to check on how she was feeling during a big block of music, and Hammar was on the phone when — all of the sudden — she knew something wasn’t right.
“All of a sudden I felt that gush,” she says.
She stood up, and realized that the studio chair she’d been sitting in had gotten soaked.
Yep, her water had broken — but Hammar didn’t know for sure that’s what had happened right away. She was in denial: After all, she still had six weeks to go before her due date!
She calmly got off the phone with the listener.
“I have that recording…and I would actually like to give myself a pat on the back for how calm I was on the phone,” she says with a laugh. “You would never guess that I was in a complete spiral about my water potentially having just broken.”
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Hammar and her husband Kyle still had plenty to do to get ready for their baby boy. She hadn’t taken the courses she wanted. She hadn’t read all the baby books and taken all the lactation classes.
But she called in a substitute, left the studio and drove herself to the hospital — a place she hadn’t even gotten to tour yet. She didn’t even know that she was supposed to enter the hospital via a special OB entrance.
“I went to the regular emergency room, and they were like, ‘Oh, we don’t do that here,'” Hammar relates. “They were just kind of looking at me wide-eyed, like, ‘Okay yeah, she needs to be in a different department.'”
Levity and funny moments aside, it’s a scary situation for anyone to go into labor six weeks early. After Hammar’s son Leo was born, he needed to spend two weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and Hammar herself spent an extra week in the hospital for blood pressure issues.
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“As a first-time mom, you imagine having your baby on your chest, and you imagine starting to breastfeed from day one,” she continues. “You never imagine seeing your baby for the first time in the NICU attached to all of these machines.”
She struggled with the fact that, because she was hospitalized herself, she wasn’t able to see him as much as she wanted. She only got to go to the NICU to visit him once a day, or occasionally, not at all.
“One of the silver linings was I could take care of myself so much more than maybe I would have been able to if he had been on my chest from day one,” she notes. “I would never wish this on anybody, but my outlook on life is to try and find those silver linings and stay grateful.”
And the family has a lot to be grateful for: Both Hammar and Leo are now home and healthy, and Hammar says they’ve received incredible family support during the newborn stage.
“I’ve definitely had these moments of pure gratitude for the village I have around me,” she says. “The whole ‘It takes a village’ thing is something that I have understood more in these past few weeks than I ever did before.”
What about that chair Hammar was sitting in when her water broke?
For all her cool, calm collected moments during her labor process, Hammar didn’t think quite so fast when it came to what to do with the chair.
In her hurry to get to the hospital, Hammar wedged it into the corner of the room behind two other chairs. But she still worried that her morning show host counterpart, Cody Alan, might accidentally sit in it when he came in the next day.
“So I’m in active labor and all I can think about is this damn studio chair and how I don’t want any of my coworkers to sit in it or be grossed out by it. I mean, this is bodily fluid! This is not hygienic,” she says, cracking up.
Courtesy of Ania Hammar
So once she knew that some of the morning crew was in the studio, she called in — still in labor — and asked producer Lauryn Snapp to move the chair out of the studio for her.
“I will report that the chair — instead of getting burned, which is what I suggested — has been professionally cleaned,” she concludes. “So it is still a used chair, as far as I know. But it has been cleaned.”
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Gallery Credit: Carena Liptak
