BOSTON (AP) – An internal investigation is under way at Brigham & Women’s Hospital after a pregnant woman, who twice was sent home by the medical staff over the weekend, gave birth to a son on the bathroom floor of her apartment.

“It’s really uncommon, and it’s incredibly disturbing to us that it happened,” Brigham and Women’s obstetrics chief, Dr. David Acker, said Monday.

Denia Baez, 30, nine months pregnant with her fourth child, went to Brigham and Women’s on Saturday morning and again about 2:30 p.m. Sunday, saying she felt ill and was bleeding slightly. However hospital staff determined that she didn’t have the strong, regular contractions that indicate the final phases of labor, and sent her home, she said told the Boston Herald from her hospital bed.

Just before 9 p.m. Sunday, Baez stepped out of the bathtub at home, felt labor pains and told her husband, Cesarin Arias, 29, that the baby was coming. Shortly, Jeremy Arias was born on the bathroom floor.

Dulce Arias, Cesarin’s sister, used a ball syringe to clear out Jeremy’s mouth, and soon the baby was breathing.

Baez and her 9-pound, 2-ounce baby were healthy and resting at Brigham and Women’s, but Acker said he would review her records and talk to Baez.

The hospital issued a statement Monday, saying that on both days that Baez came to the hospital, medical staff physically examined her and “determined she was not in labor.”

Acker declined to comment on Baez’s case specifically, but said he had a rule of thumb in deciding whether to admit a woman to labor and delivery: “If the mother says it’s coming, it’s coming. Trust the mother.”

Other obstetricians said it is very common to send anxious pregnant women home with the reassurance that they are not about to deliver – and usually the doctors are correct.

If a woman is not having regular painful contractions less than 10 minutes apart, she probably is not about to give birth, Dr. Ellen H. Delpapa, medical director of labor and delivery at UMass Medical Center in Worcester, told The Boston Globe.

Brigham & Women’s obstetrics department is the busiest in New England, with about 10,000 deliveries each year, and Acker estimated that only once or twice a year does a woman who planned to deliver there have the baby outside the hospital owning to miscalculations by either doctor or patient.

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