Gayla Thompson, a 29-year-old photographer in Nashville, delivered her son in the passenger seat of her Jeep after a traffic jam kept her from making it to the hospital.

Gayla Thompson’s first experience with childbirth, five years ago, went smoothly. It was a natural birth, she tells: Her water ʙʀᴏᴋᴇ, and then 10 hours later, her son was born. But when it came time to plan the birth of her second child, whose due date was June 21, she made other ᴘʀᴇᴘᴀʀᴀtɪᴏɴs. “I want two or three ᴇᴘɪᴅᴜʀᴀʟs,” Thompson, 29, a photographer based in Nashville, says, reflecting on her birth plan. Of course, birth plans are only plans, and Thompson’s didn’t work out quite the way she expected. She ended up giving birth to her second son, Ϲarson, five days early while on the way to the hospital.

Thompson said she began having ᴄᴏɴtʀᴀᴄtɪᴏɴs the night before, but two things stopped her from going to the hospital. First, she had no babysitter lined up for her older son, who was too young to be allowed in the hospital. But also, her ᴄᴏɴtʀᴀᴄtɪᴏɴs were irregular, coming either two minutes, 15 minutes, or even an hour apart. Since she wasn’t sure the ᴄᴏɴtʀᴀᴄtɪᴏɴs were real labor, she decided to wait them out and see how she felt in the morning.

The next day, Thompson got up and took a hot bath, then immediately realized she was going into labor.  Soon they were on their way to the hospital. Everything was fine until Thompson and her husband were less than 10 minutes out from the hospital, when traffic suddenly came to a standstill. Dead stop traffic. The moment they hit traffic, her water ʙʀᴇᴀᴋs.

Thompson had put on an adult diaper before leaving for the hospital, just in case her water ʙʀᴏᴋᴇ en route, and she struggled to get it off in time to deliver her baby. as her husband tried to weave through traffic to pull to the side of the road while simultaneously calling 911, she asked him to cut the diaper off. Then, Thompson began snapping photos while delivering.

“His head got stuck, and I could not push at all to get him out until [my] next contraction. We started Fʀᴇᴀᴋɪɴɢ out with EMTs 10 or 15 minutes away.”

But her next contraction came soon enough, and she delivered Ϲarson while in the passenger seat of her Jeep. The umbilical cord had been ᴡʀᴀᴘᴘᴇᴅ ᴀʀᴏᴜɴᴅ her son’s neck, but her husband removed it, and the baby made some reassuring coughing noises.

Luckily, that was the ᴡᴏʀst of her problems. “My body is completely healed. I’m already done ʙʟᴇᴇᴅɪɴɢ. No stɪtᴄʜɪɴɢ, ɴᴏ tᴇᴀʀɪɴɢ,” she says.

Thompson and her son are doing fine now, and she’s already seeing the humor in her experience. “It was a very wild ride,” she says, adding that she and her husband now find the name Ϲarson-which was planned prior to his roadside delivery-amusing and particularly fitting.