Nurses at Sharp Grossmont told 29-year-old Hannah Michaelis she needed to go to another hospital. She gave birth to her baby in her car.
SAN DIEGO — As Hannah Michaelis groaned in agony in the front seat of her mother’s car on the steps of Sharp Grossmont’s Labor and Delivery Unit, her mother, Carla Michaelis, pleaded with a 911 dispatcher for help.
“My daughter’s in the car, she’s six months pregnant and is in excruciating pain. They said they can’t see her here,” said Carla Michaelis.
Michaelis had rushed her daughter to the closest hospital to her home. Michaelis rushed inside to let nurses know that her daughter, Hannah, needed immediate attention.
Michaels says the nurses refused, telling Michaelis that she needed to drive her daughter to another hospital that specializes in extremely premature babies.
Unsure what to do to help her daughter, Michaelis called 911.
“Unfortunately, if you’re at the hospital, we don’t respond to the hospital to take you to a different hospital,” said the dispatcher.
“They told me to take her to [UC San Diego], I can’t take her to UCSD, she’s in excruciating pain,” Michaelis said. “She’s screaming.”
Carla Michaelis started driving to UCSD, but as she drove out of Sharp Grossmont, her daughter’s cries intensified.
Michaelis turned her car around. She parked at the hospital doors and ran inside to beg for help.
When nurses finally agreed, Carla Michaelis said they put Hannah in a wheelchair, unbeknownst to them that Samuel was already born. The force of Hannah’s weight on Samuel’s head and body caused Samuel to suffer a catastrophic brain injury.
Within five days, Samuel, Hannah’s first baby and Carla’s first grandbaby, was dead.
Now, nearly a year to the date, Hannah Michaelis and her mother, Carla, are suing Sharp Grossmont for medical negligence.
“Hannah and I want justice for our family,” Carla told CBS 8. “We don’t want this to ever happen to anybody else. We want whatever change needs to occur. No one should be turned away from the hospital like we were.”
CBS 8 interviewed Carla Michaelis about the incident as her daughter, Hannah, was unable to conduct the interview.
The Birth of Baby Samuel Vorenkamp
Carla Michaelis was worried her daughter, Hanna, wouldn’t get the type of medical care she needed for her first pregnancy.
The 29-year-old pregnant mother had moved to rural Tennessee to be with her partner and the father of her baby, Samuel.
Carla Michaelis flew Hannah to San Diego in March 2024 to stay with her and get the medical care she needed.
“There’s not really a lot of hospitals or doctors near where she was living,” Carla Michaelis told CBS 8. “I begged her to come home so I could make sure she had really good care, and so she’d have, you know, good hospitals, good doctors at her disposal at any time that she needed. So I begged her to come home and let me take care of her through her pregnancy.”
Hannah arrived in San Diego County in March 2024, four months pregnant and eager to become a mother. Her mother, Carla, was just as excited.
“Hannah was taking the utmost care of herself. I had made sure she had all the prenatal vitamins. She was eating healthier than she’s ever eaten and taking better care of herself,” said Carla Michaelis. “It was too important to her and to me for us to do anything other than take care of that body so we could have that baby.”
On May 4, 2024, Carla Michaelis says Hannah asked to go to the hospital after feeling discomfort and seeing a small amount of discharge. It was the second time in a handful of days that Hannah had requested to see a doctor.
Carla Michaelis said she took Hannah to the nearest hospital, Sharp Grossmont, for observation. Michaelis said the doctors and nurses checked Hannah out and ran some tests, but didn’t find anything out of sorts.
Carla Michaelis said doctors told her and Hannah to come back to Grossmont or go to another hospital if Hannah’s condition worsened.
The next day, May 5, it did.
“I woke up and Hannah was very uncomfortable,” Carla Michaelis said. “She was yelling in agony. She told me she felt pressure, and at that moment, I told her to get her clothes on. I knew feeling pressure was not good.”
Michaelis rushed her daughter to Sharp Grossmont.
Familiar with the layout of the La Mesa hospital, and knowing her daughter was unable to walk, Michaelis drove to the Labor and Delivery Unit’s front doors and rushed in for help as Hannah Michaelis screamed in pain inside the car.
Michaelis said she went to a group of nurses who were standing at the main desk.
“I went over to the lady closest to me, and I begged her. I said, ‘I need your help. My daughter’s in the car, and she needs your help.’ I said that we were at the hospital the night before, and that we need your help.”
The nurses, said Carla Michaelis, asked how far along Hannah was. Michaelis said 24 weeks.
“She said, ‘We can’t help you here,'” remembered Michaelis. “You’re going to have to take her someplace else. And I said, ‘No, you don’t understand; I can’t take her anywhere else. ‘ I was told to bring her back to the nearest emergency room, and I’m here. And she said, ‘We can’t help you here.'”
Michaelis walked outside to the car, where Hannah was now writhing in pain.
Michaelis called 911 for help.
Below is the 911 call from Carla Michaelis.
“Hello, I’m at Sharp Grossmont Hospital for Women and Newborns,” Michaelis told the dispatcher, according to transcripts of the call obtained by CBS 8. “My daughter’s in the car, she’s six months pregnant, and she’s having excruciating pain. They said they can’t really see her here because if she is in labor, the baby…they can’t take care of it. So they told me to take her to UCSD. I can’t drive her to UCSD in this. She’s in excruciating pain. She’s screaming.”
The dispatcher reported a problem. She couldn’t dispatch an ambulance to a hospital.
“Unfortunately, the fire department, if you’re at the hospital, we don’t respond to the hospital to transfer you to a different one,” the dispatcher told Michaelis.
Carla Michaelis hung up the phone and began driving to UCSD to seek help for Hannah.
A few minutes later, the same 911 dispatcher called Sharp Grossmont to check on the situation.
“I just had a mother call in,” said the dispatcher. “I guess she has her daughter. Are you guys with her or I don’t know? She hung up talking.”
The nurse responded, “Yes, I don’t know she’s yelling and screaming. I have a nurse going out to her car right now. She was told to go to UCSD yesterday if she had any further complications, and she just kind of stormed out, saying she was going to call 911, and I was like, No, they’re not going to take you to another hospital.”
Said the dispatcher, “Okay, so I just want to confirm you guys do not need the fire department. You will handle, correct?”
The nurse replied, “No, we do not need that. Thank you so much.”
Listen to the call made by 911 dispatch to Grossmont Hospital.
Meanwhile, Carla Michaelis drove just a few feet before turning around and heading back into Sharp Grossmont’s Labor and Delivery Unit.
“I blew past the front desk, went straight to the nurses who were standing there, and I said, ‘My daughter’s in pain. She needs you, and you’re going to do your job, and you’re going to come out and you’re going to get that wheelchair, and you’re going to come out to my car and you’re going to help her right now,” Carla Michaelis remembers saying.
When the nurses and Michaelis got back to the car, Hannah Michaelis was in pain. Her water broke. She told her mom that she thought she might have given birth already.
Despite the information, Carla Michaelis said the nurse refused to check Hannah and put her in a wheelchair and carted her off to the hospital.
Carla Michaelis tells CBS 8 that Hannah did, in fact, deliver the two-pound baby Samuel and that he became severely injured by not getting taken out of Hannah’s pants before nurses transported her to the room.
Nurses and doctors immediately rushed Baby Samuel to an incubator. He was badly bruised but moving and alert.
Over the next five days, Hannah Michaelis, her partner Sam, and Carla Michaelis huddled together in the hospital, visiting Samuel as often as they could.
However, the baby’s condition worsened. After getting transported to UC San Diego Medical Center, Samuel developed a brain bleed.
On May 9, after being told Samuel would not survive on his own, Hannah Michaelis and her partner agreed to remove Samuel from life support.
“I rack my brain all the time thinking, what else could I have done?” asked Carla Michaelis. “Would she have been better staying in Tennessee, in rural Tennessee? Should I have taken her to a different hospital? I rack my brain all the time thinking what else could I have done, but I took her where I thought she was going to get the best care.”
Attorney Janna Trolia represents Carla and Hannah Michaelis in a newly filed lawsuit against Sharp Hospital. Trolia says the 15 minutes when Hannah was sitting in pain inside her mother’s car, instead of getting the help she needed, meant life and death for Samuel.
“If Hannah had been immediately triaged and brought into a labor and delivery suite or operating room—rather than left to give birth alone in her underwear outside the labor unit—Baby Samuel would have received life-saving interventions the moment he was born,” said attorney Trolia.
“We find it profoundly disturbing that Grossmont staff mocked and ridiculed Carla as she pleaded for assistance, while Hannah was forced to deliver her firstborn child into her underwear just outside the hospital’s entrance.”
Trolia said the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) law requires hospitals to admit pregnant mothers regardless of their condition or how far along they are in their pregnancy.
Meanwhile, Carla Michaelis said she and her daughter are attending counseling together, but something is missing when she looks at Hannah.
“She doesn’t want her business out, but she’s not okay. She’s healing, but there is irreparable harm. She’s a completely different person.”
CBS 8 reached out to Sharp Hospital for comment. A spokesperson said the hospital was unable to comment due to patient privacy laws and pending litigation.
