Thanksgiving came early — and with a Happy Meal — for a Georgia mom who gave birth on a McDonald’s bathroom floor.
The day before Thanksgiving, Alandria Worthy and her fiancé, Deandre Phillips, were on their way to the hospital to deliver their bundle of joy, but a quick pitstop turned the fast food chain’s bathroom into a birthing room. Luckily, several McDonald’s employees jumped to the mother’s aid.
The parents left for the hospital at 7:30 a.m. when Worthy’s contractions were about a minute and a half apart, they told local Atlanta outlet 11Alive. But while on their 45-minute drive from their Airbnb to the hospital, Worthy got the sudden urge to use the bathroom and they stopped at McDonald’s Fulton Industrial Boulevard location. Her fiance waited for her in the car.
“I went into the bathroom and my water broke immediately,” Worthy recalled to the outlet. “It was an experience because it happened so fast.”
At that point, Worthy screamed for help, alerting the location’s general manager, Tunisia Woodward. “I thought they was joking, and I open this door, didn’t see anyone, but I saw feet [under the door],” Woodward told the outlet. “I opened, and she was on this toilet lying back, screaming. Then I knew to tell my crew; we’re having a baby today.”
Once Philips realized his fiancee’s bathroom break was taking too long, he went to check on her to find Woodward and two other employees, Sha’querria Kaigler and Keisha Blue-Murray, helping her through labor.
“She was on the toilet screaming,” Phillips retold to the local news outlet. “I was trying to calm her down because she was frantic. I was like just breathe. I got her on the floor, and I took off my clothes. The ladies at McDonald’s were at her front side, holding her hands, I had her feet propped up on my knees. We told her to push three pushes. She was a fighter.”
Philips and the McDonald’s crew were receiving instructions over the phone from emergency dispatchers, who said Worthy was moments away from giving birth on the road if it wasn’t for the “divine intervention” that brought her to her McDonald’s midwives.
“We all are mothers and so we put our heads together and all we needed daddy to do was catch the baby. And he did,” Woodward said. “It’s a day I’ll never forget. I’m going to tell this story from here on out.”
After less than 15 minutes of labor, Nandi Ariyah Moremi Phillips was born.
However, the parents said they are going to give her a fitting nickname: Little Nugget.
“She’s definitely a nugget,” Phillips said. “My parents loved the name, too. We were like, okay, it fits her. My little nugget.”
