So she was a mother eight months pregnant with a special-needs child thousands
of miles from home. She wakes up in the middle of the night with
contractions and amniotic leakage and she tells her husband she doesn’t want
to call her doctor because it would wake her up at 1am. And she is the
sitting governor of a state and her doctor is a close personal friend. Not
only that, but she gives the speech as planned in the afternoon, during
which she makes a rather good joke. She then tells us what happens next:
“Big laughs. More contractions.”
After the speech, does she then go to a local hospital to get checked out?
Nah. She gets on two separate aeroplanes all the way back to Alaska, with a
stopover in Seattle, because she is determined to have the child in her home
town and she just knows that the contractions and amniotic leakage are not
signs of imminent delivery. She has had four previous kids so she has
experience. “I still had plenty of time ... It was a calm, relatively
restful flight home,” she explains of the next 15 hours.
