With his wife paralyzed by the pain of contractions that jeopardized her pregnancy, David Weber hit the gas pedal to save his unborn baby's life.
Now, the 32-year-old father is sitting in his farmhouse in rural Manitoba, frustrated by a system that has left him caring for a young family with a whopping speeding ticket and a suspended license.
Weber plans to appeal the license suspension at a hearing with Manitoba Public Insurance next week - but first, he hopes to be publicly heard.
On March 21, Weber and his wife Genevieve, 29, were on their way back to their spacious hobby farm outside Portage la Prairie, Man., after a day spent shopping in Winnipeg. Genevieve was 38 weeks pregnant with the couple's second child; due to a complication while giving birth to daughter Madison, now 3, doctors warned that natural labour could put future babies at risk.
So when contractions struck and blood started to flow inside their vehicle on Highway 1 near Oakville, the Webers panicked.
Their hope: to make it to General Hospital in nearby Brandon, where Genevieve's doctors and medical records were waiting. She was scheduled to have a Caesarean section there only five days later, still a week before her due date - but at that moment, with Genevieve's contractions already coming fewer than five minutes apart, fear set in.
Although he doesn't usually speed, he said, David hit the gas on the couple's silver Honda Civic, surging as fast as 170 kilometres an hour on clear and lightly trafficked roads. When the couple saw an RCMP cruiser's lights flash just outside Portage la Prairie, they were "really relieved," Genevieve said.
"We were thinking, 'Now we'll get escorted!'" she said.
The officer did encourage them to go to Portage General Hospital to seek surgery or call an ambulance to take them to Brandon. But worried about transfer time, and the fact that they had been advised that Portage General Hospital does not normally perform routine C-sections, the stressed couple begged to push forward to Brandon.
Instead of an escort, they came away from the 15-minute traffic stop with a $1,000 speeding ticket - and a warning.
"He said, 'if you go to Brandon, I don't want to see you guys speeding,'" David said. "I was half-crying . . . I said, 'We don't have time for a lecture.' (I was) trying to save my wife and baby's life."
Back on the road, with Genevieve in increasing pain, Weber hit the gas again. Thirty minutes later, he was stopped by a Carberry RCMP officer who had been alerted that the Webers may be speeding toward Brandon. The Carberry officer issued David another speeding ticket, warned him again of the dangers of speeding, and called an ambulance. The Webers estimate they waited about 15 minutes for the ambulance to arrive.
"I couldn't believe this was happening," Genevieve recalled. "I want my baby to be safe, and they're not taking me seriously. They're not protecting us. There's no common sense left, or something."
The good news - the Webers' baby, Anabela, was born healthy in Brandon after an emergency C-section.
Soon after the incident, Weber - who does not have a history of dangerous driving, he said - went before a justice of the peace to ask for compassion, showing a letter from their doctor stating that, by the time Genevieve made it into the operating room, her uterus was "very close to rupture" and Anabela was in distress.
Despite a doctor's support, the justice of the peace declined to drop Weber's ticket or replace it with a reprimand. © Copyright (c) The Windsor Star
Once again flatfooters and bureaucrats bound by regulation rather than commonsense.