A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Maternity Ward . . .

Cassandra Adkins, nine months pregnant, walked into a Newberry’s last week, spotted a white blanket covered with teddy bears, and decided she just had to have it for her new baby.

The blanket, it develops, came in handy, but a map of Los Angeles might have been a better purchase.

Adkins, 20, gave birth in the back seat of a station wagon Monday, when what was supposed to be a quick trip to the maternity ward of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center turned into a harrowing two-hour race through the streets of Watts, downtown and West Los Angeles.

“I was praying the whole time,” Adkins said in a telephone interview from her hospital room, where she and her baby were resting comfortably Monday afternoon.

Somewhere, somehow, on the way from the Jordan Downs housing project in Watts to Cedars-Sinai, Adkins and three relatives who were escorting her became lost.

“I was so frightened,” the young mother said. “I thought we’d never get there.”

And they didn’t.

At least not before the baby, who was to be named Jasmine, entered the world in the back seat of the blue Buick station wagon, parked at an Exxon station three blocks from the hospital. “I can’t believe that I had her in the car,” Adkins said.

It all started before dawn Monday, when Adkins went into labor and called her sister-in-law to take her to the hospital.

Adkins was covered by a Cigna Corp. health plan, but because its downtown medical center does not have the facilities to deliver babies, all of its expectant patients are sent to Cedars-Sinai, Cigna nurse Nora Hopelian said.

So Adkins, her sister, Juansetta, and sisters-in-law Christine Bowles and Shawn Crossland piled into Christine’s car at 5:30 a.m. and set off for Cedars-Sinai, a little more than half an hour away at that hour.

“I asked Shawn to come along because she’d had a baby at Cedars and I thought she knew where it was,” Adkins said. Unfortunately, “she didn’t know how to get there by freeway.”

First they went the wrong way and wound up downtown instead of on the Santa Monica Freeway.

“My pains were getting so bad, we stopped at Cigna Hospital to get directions,” Adkins said. “(The doctor) said I still had time until the baby was born . . . and he told my sister-in-law to keep going straight down Temple and turn on 3rd” to get to the medical center.

Missed First Turn

The doctor gave the women a small map. They jumped back into their car and sped off down Temple. They missed their first turn, however, and before long were meandering off-course in unfamiliar parts of West Los Angeles.

“I kept asking, ‘How much longer do we have to go?’ ” said Adkins, who added that she peeked out of the window in search of the medical center, in between prayers and labor pains.

Then it happened.

“We passed the hospital up,” Adkins said. “We turned around--and that’s when my water broke.”

Bowles pulled into the Exxon station in the 900 block of Santa Monica Boulevard, jumped out of the car with Crossland and ran to a phone booth to call 911 and summon paramedics. Adkins’ sister stayed with her in the car.

‘The Baby’s Here’

“I told my sister I could feel (the baby) coming,” Adkins said. So her sister reached into the back of the station wagon and pulled out the white blanket with the teddy bears.

“By the time she got the blanket out and turned around to put it underneath me, (the baby) had slipped straight out,” Adkins said. “My sister yelled to my sisters-in-law, ‘The baby’s here already.’ ”

So the women wrapped the crying 6-pound infant in the blanket and waited for the ambulance to arrive.

But there was one last complication. “When they called 911 at the phone booth, the people (on the other end) couldn’t hear them. So they asked the gas station attendant if they could use the phone,” Adkins said.

Paramedics Arrived

He refused--until he peeked into the car window and saw she had just delivered a baby girl. They then made the phone call, and within minutes police and paramedics arrived.

Adkins rode the remaining few blocks to the hospital in an ambulance, while her kin followed in the station wagon. Cedars-Sinai spokeswoman, Peggy Shaff, said both Adkins and baby Jasmine were doing fine late Monday. Shaff added that a baby is delivered en route to the hospital about once every two months.

In the end, Adkins said, everything came out fine.

“I was happy, (but) mainly because I had a girl,” she said. “I already have two boys.”

The boys, she felt obliged to add, were born in a hospital.