The Obstetrician, the Gorilla, and the Historic Delivery

Fort Worth Zoo officials had spent weeks keeping the secret of this whopper of a big reveal, which when disclosed would be a groundbreaking moment for the zoo and the broader wildlife conservation community worldwide. The news would create headlines across the globe. But every precaution was taken to ensure secrecy, which was essential in the first several weeks of this new animal life, her unique arrival to her ecosystem on planet Earth, and for the recovery of her mother, who had wounds that required careful attention. Their well-being was the top priority, and with each passing day, confidence grew that a positive outcome would be achieved. 

The secrecy caused, if only for a brief moment, some conflict in the home of Dr. Jamie Erwin, 44, an OB-GYN whose practice is headquartered in the offices of ViVi Women’s Health in Fort Worth.  

But the cat was let out of the bag on Feb. 14, a year ago — Valentine’s Day. The moment had lifted the veil on what had been going on in the clinic of the Fort Worth Zoo. Six weeks earlier, 33-year-old Sekani had delivered a premature western lowland gorilla by cesarean section, the first such procedure — conducted by a multidisciplinary team of veterinarians and physicians — in the 116 years of the Fort Worth Zoo. 

The pregnancy, Sekani’s fourth, had been routine with an expected delivery of the middle of February. However, right after the first of the year, zookeepers took notice of Sekani showing signs of discomfort, which only increased to the point of trembling, according to a zoo veterinarian, Dr. Sarah Cannizzo. The condition, Cannizzo and zoo staff feared, was preeclampsia, a serious condition involving high blood pressure during pregnancy that can occur in humans and primates.  

One can’t merely ask a gorilla about her symptoms. Is it simply a headache? Maybe allergies? But the lip shaking was a giveaway that something more menacing was at play.  

Subsequent testing supported the preeclampsia suspicions, and veterinarians determined that intervention was necessary to save the life of the mother and give her baby the best chance for survival.  

But that wasn’t all. To do this required more expertise than the zoo was able to provide. Cannizzo and staff called in a team of human doctors, led by Erwin, a board-certified physician in obstetrics and gynecology, to take the lead in the premature delivery.  

Erwin has been the zoo’s consultant on primate OB-GYN matters since 2015. She took over the role from Dr. David Holmes, who was retiring. The zoo also had a cardiologist consultant. Erwin didn’t know anything about gorillas or any other nonhuman primates, but primates are humans’ closest living relatives in the animal kingdom with many biological similarities.  

The job of consultant generally entailed taking a call or email from time to time. For example, she gave counsel on the course of action for a gorilla with an ovarian cyst.  

This, however, was something altogether different.  

“We told my daughter, but we didn’t trust Henry to not go to school and tell all his friends,” says Erwin, joking about her son, while acknowledging the limitations inherent in 8-year-olds keeping safe highly classified intel. 

On the day of the news conference, Henry was both mesmerized by the news and a little miffed that he had been kept in the dark, says Erwin, who since 2023 has served as medical director at Baylor Scott & White Andrews Women’s Hospital. 

“Henry is like, ‘Why are we going to the zoo?’” Erwin recalls with a smile. His father told him it was because Mom had delivered a baby gorilla. “Henry was like, ‘What!?’ He was so mad we didn’t tell him.” 

There were complications with the mother bonding with the baby, zoo officials said, but, otherwise, Fort Worth’s precious little miracle infant was doing well with keepers providing around-the-clock care.  

The entire operation was top-secret stuff. Erwin put together a team of human doctor teammates in a matter of hours under the cover of figurative darkness. 

In addition to Erwin, Dr. Robert Ursprung and Dr. Chad Barber, both board certified in neonatal-perinatal medicine, were also on this team, as were Dennis Occkiogrosso, a certified registered nurse anesthetist, and Andrew Coats, a licensed surgical assistant.  

It was a dream assignment for them, this pro bono mission each willingly volunteered to take part in.  

“I never dreamed I would be doing this,” Erwin says. “Never. For an OB-GYN, this is bucket list. I never imagined this.” 

Each of the participants gathered in a room before the news conference — zoo staff and veterinarians, and Erwin’s human doctor team. Before they went out front to tell the story and take questions from media members, Erwin had a question that was met with some awkwardness: What is the name of the new baby? 

They all deferred, telling her that they planned to announce the name at the news conference. It was a surprise. 

More secrets.  

“We’re naming her Jameela — J-A-M-E-E-L-A,” said Linda Roberts, the zoo’s primate supervisor. “In Swahili it means ‘beautiful.’ And we think this baby is beautiful, but also Jameela is kind of like Jamie.  

“We’re naming the baby Jameela for Jamie because of her assistance and her immediate response to our needs.” 

Like her son, Erwin met the revelation of this secret with emotion.  

She wiped a tear from her eye.  

As it turned out, the real hero in the story of baby Jameela is Fredrika — Freddy — at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.  

The story is well-documented. Sekani failed to bond with her baby. Theories abound about why that happened. Zoo officials initially believed Sekani’s reaction was a result of her not experiencing the normal hormonal fluctuations that occur during a natural and full-term birth. Still others believe it was because of the required separation of mother and baby because of the medical care they each demanded.  

The zoo tried two surrogates for Jameela, but neither succeeded. Freddy, 50, is the oldest gorilla in the troop in Cleveland and had previously raised four infants. Freddy is also raising another as a surrogate, Kayembe, the first baby gorilla in Cleveland Metroparks’ history. Kayembe, meaning “extraordinary,” was born premature, too. When his mother failed to show a maternal bond, Freddy stepped in. 

So, with that experience, only four years ago now, Fort Worth Zoo officials bet on Freddy, who willingly adopted Jameela as her own.  

“To me, she is a hero, right?” said Erwin.  

Officially, Jameela is “on loan” to Cleveland. So, there’s a possibility she will be returned to her home city one day, but “that would be years from now,” says Cannizzo, the Fort Worth Zoo veterinarian. Elmo, Jameela’s father, would either have to have crossed over to his eternal destination in the afterlife or be retired as the silverback.  

Erwin’s role in Jameela’s story is all the more impactful perhaps because Fort Worth is Erwin’s home city. Like a lot of us, she grew up at the zoo. It almost certainly fed her curiosity about science and medicine as a career.  

Erwin spent her first five years in and around Austin, born to Lindy and Margaret Walker. She started first grade at J.T. Stevens Elementary in southwest Fort Worth after moving with her family when Lindy was hired to help build Comanche Peak in Glen Rose.  

She calls junior high school at William James Magnet School on the East Side a formative experience that put her on the path to a career in medicine.  

“I absolutely loved it. It was so good,” she says. “And with my track and sports, competing with local kids, too, it just taught me so many life lessons. I loved it.” 

Academics were advanced there — she was taking marine biology in one course — and she also began creating an identity as a track athlete.  

In 1999 as a senior at Paschal, Erwin was awarded the prestigious Davey O’Brien High School Scholarship Award of $25,000. The award is based on academic standing, citizenship, and athletic accomplishment. Erwin was a nationally ranked heptathlete being recruited by several NCAA Division I schools.  

The interviews of the finalists were a preview of the busy life she would one day juggle. She was in Washington, D.C., the same week as the interviews with her advanced placement government class. She left the Pentagon on a Tuesday afternoon to fly home to Fort Worth for the interview on Wednesday morning. She was back in Washington by Wednesday afternoon.  

Today, Erwin serves on the Davey O’Brien Board of Trustees and High School Scholarship Committee, where she shares with the world what the Davey O’Brien Foundation has meant to her. She has been the MC of the luncheon the O’Brien Board hosts to announce the winner of the high school scholarship.  

“I grew up very middle class. I did not come from wealth. My parents were both just self-made, and they created a great life for us. Never went without, but we couldn’t afford private school,” she says. “William James and Paschal were amazing. It’s what I needed. So, with the Davey O’Brien money, I was able to save that because I got a full ride to Arkansas, and I was able to use Dave O’Brien to pay for medical school. What a gift!” 

Erwin went to the University of Arkansas on a full academic scholarship, though she also became an NCAA Division I All-American and a silver medalist in the Southeastern Conference Track and Field Championships. In 2000, she won the USA Track & Field Junior National Champion (19 and under) and qualified for the 2000 USA Track & Field Junior World Championships in Santiago, Chile. 

The night she accepted the O’Brien Award, Erwin addressed the gala at The Fort Worth Club. Luminaries in attendance included Troy Aikman, the 1988 Davey O’Brien Award winner, presented to the top college quarterback in the nation, and Peyton Manning, the 1997 winner. That year’s winner was Michael Bishop of Kansas State.  

“It was a little intimidating,” she told a reporter afterward, but “everybody was so welcoming. So many people had nice things to say about me. I came away feeling really encouraged about my potential.” 

After earning a degree in biochemistry at Arkansas, Erwin moved to Dallas to attend medical school at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. She served her residency at University of Alabama Birmingham Obstetrics and Gynecology in Alabama. She completed that phase in 2012. Her research was titled: “Post-Radiation Surveillance of Cervical Cancer: The Effectiveness of Cervicovaginal Cytology After Primary Curative Therapy.” 

She has also contributed to numerous publications and presentations on a variety of topics in gynecology, showcasing her expertise and commitment to advancing women’s health. 

I didn’t dare ask her about that. She would have needed days to explain it to me. But I did ask her about what drives her to show up to work every day. It’s rewarding certainly.  

“I knew very quickly that I wanted to do procedures, be in the [operating room], or so something surgical likely,” she says of her decision to pursue OB-GYN. “I like working with my hands. I didn’t want to be talking all day long. I really wanted to be hands-on.” 

She could narrow her focus to women’s anatomy — be an expert on women — “but it still had variety.” 

“And I liked that continuity, and that long-term relationship was important to me. That connection. That connection is really what motivates me and keeps me in this.” 

Erwin tells a story about a patient inquiring about her favorite part of the job. Erwin says she has two different answers. And “favorite” is the wrong word. The right word is “impact,” the most impactful and rewarding moments. Early in her career, she would have said her most rewarding moments are the happy, joyful moments — delivering healthy, happy babies to happy families.  

“And that is amazing, no doubt about it,” she says, “but [now] I would say the most rewarding and the most impactful part of being an OB-GYN is actually the opposite. It’s showing up on the worst day of a woman’s life — the patient who is having her third miscarriage and she can’t get pregnant; having to tell her that news that there’s no heartbeat; or the couple, we just did their anatomy sonogram and their baby has a lethal anomaly. Their baby’s not going to live. Or telling a woman she has cancer. Fill in the blank.  

“Those interactions have the most opportunity. I mean, you could be a robot doctor and show no empathy, and that would be the easier thing to do. Just get through it, not connect. Here’s this medicine. We will do this surgery. Here’s the referral. Bye. 

“But I see this as a privileged conversation, intimate. I’m the one. I have been chosen to give this news and to walk alongside this woman and her partner or her family, and it literally is the worst day of their life. But I get to be there and I get to do that, and I get to help her through that. And then sometimes, God willing, I get to see the comeback.” 

It is more than medical training, communication skills, or emotional intelligence that Erwin relies on for that part of the job.  

Where is it, if at all, I ask her, that faith and science and medicine coexist? The doubting Thomas scientist approaches the questions of life from a rational, empirical, scientific perspective rather than a theological or philosophical one.  

Both, however, are equally important and necessary to understand the world around us, Erwin says.  

“You can’t have one without the other,” Erwin says. “I think the more you learn of science, the more you can see of God … the closer you get to God. It’s a Venn diagram. They’re not mutually exclusive.  

“I can’t do what I do without my faith. I can’t. The depth of hurting and pain and grief and suffering that I have witnessed women experience and have walked them through … I couldn’t do it without my faith. I couldn’t. I’d be burned out and I’d quit.” 

Erwin has traveled the world providing medical missionary care, including in Ambato, Ecuador, and Bangalore, India, where she has contributed to improving health care access and outcomes for underserved communities. 

Erwin grew up at Travis Avenue Baptist Church, at the corner of Hemphill and Berry in south Fort Worth. Across the street on Hemphill, where the old Berry Theater once entertained the neighborhood before television sets became a typical household amenity, is the Mercy Clinic. The Mercy Clinic serves impoverished — and uninsured — adults residing in 76104, 76110, and 76115 ZIP codes.  

Erwin serves on the board there, as well as the Lifeline Pregnancy Center and the Human Coalition.  

Servant leadership: It’s what Davey O’Brien would have done.  

The zoo had witnessed two live births of western lowland gorillas — Gus and Bruno, both offspring of Elmo and Gracie — since Erwin took over for Dr. David Holmes as OB-GYN consultant in 2015.  

Western lowland gorillas are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature because of hunting and disease. Gorillas also have a low reproductive rate, so even if there was a drastic decline in hunting and disease, it could take decades for population recovery to occur in best-case scenarios.  

Gus was born in 2022.  

“I don’t even think they let me know she was pregnant with Bruno because she had no problems,” says Erwin. “She did great. No issues whatsoever. I was on standby around Gracie’s due date, but really it was after it was all said and done, they just texted me [with something like], ‘She did great. Everything’s fine.’” 

Erwin was out of town for a holiday vacation in Colorado Springs when the zoo called the first of January. It might have been New Year’s Day, Erwin begins to think as we talk.  

The first call from Cannizzo, the zoo vet, was just to put news of Sekani’s approaching due date in mid-February on Erwin’s calendar. Shortly after that call, however, an email followed from the zoo.  

Can we talk? 

Sekani at 31 weeks pregnant was showing signs of discomfort. In cases of preeclampsia in the third trimester, “we deliver those women early,” Erwin says, adding that generally they try to get women to 34 weeks of a 40-week gestation period. In gorillas, gestation is 36 weeks.  

What can be done as far as testing, Erwin asks the zoo. 

“Some gorillas are trained — they’ll come up and let you draw their blood,” Erwin says. “Others, not so much. So, that was not an option. Sekani is kind of ornery, honestly. She’s kind of a feisty one. And she’s pregnant, so, I’m sure that changes things.” 

The data on gorilla C-section births is foggy. It has certainly happened, most recently at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston in 2020. How often and how successful are different stories because if there’s not a good outcome, we don’t hear about it, zoo officials say.  

Zookeepers, though, were able to get a urine sample. That showed high levels of protein, which is a characteristic of preeclampsia. The concern was that it was severe. That meant they needed to deliver.  

All of this unfolded over three days in early January. Erwin was still in Colorado, but on this particular Wednesday, the zoo and Erwin decided they would do the surgery at noon Friday — two days later. From Colorado, Erwin began assembling her team.  

“Dr. Cannizzo asked me if I could get some anesthesia help and a neonatologist to come help,” Erwin says. “I was able to call my colleagues, and that was a really fun conversation.” 

Oh, and this is top secret. 

“You can’t talk about it. You can’t tell anybody. This is under the radar. It was really exciting.” 

Erwin marvels at how well Cannizzo had everything orchestrated on the day of the surgery. All the participants — vet team and staff, Erwin, the neonatologists, Occkiogrosso, nurse anesthetist, and Coats — huddled for a briefing to line out everyone’s role. Everybody had name tags. 

“Everybody knew [what to do],” Erwin says. “It was a like a military operation. It was really cool.” 

Once briefed, they all got into vans and were transported the back route to the primate enclosure. Zoo staff darted Sekani to tranquilize her, and she was transported to another space where Occkiogrosso intubated her to secure an airway. 

“I think the anesthesia aspect of this whole thing was probably the most important as far as I’m concerned,” Erwin says. “But he really went above and beyond doing his homework and research because mine was the same [role]. I had zero preparation. I just did what I usually do [because the anatomy is the same]. But he looked into metabolism. He also pulled up case reports on gorillas who had been under anesthesia.” 

The team does its prep work: shave Sekani’s abdomen, place the catheter in her bladder, brush some swabs for typical testing.  

There on the table lay the most unlikely patient in Erwin’s career. All so human, but absolutely not.  

“The smell was incredible,” Erwin says. “It was an intense animal odor that I’ll never forget. It was like the Stock Show times 20 when you go walk around Will Rogers. I mean, it’s not like she’s bathing. She didn’t get ready for us.  

“So, we get her all ready, and then we move her into the actual operating room. And then it’s business as usual. It was like autopilot for us.” 

From skin to skin — that is doctor-speak for the first incision made to the last incision being closed — the procedure took “45 minutes, maybe.” 

Typically, in human cases, general anesthesia is not used in C-sections. When it is, doctors work expeditiously, getting the baby out within 60 seconds, Erwin says. It’s important that the infant not be exposed to the anesthesia.  

Because of the circumstances, Jameela was very sedated at birth. And that was concerning at first. 

Dr. Ursprung assisted with the immediate resuscitation and stabilization of the premature gorilla, including respiratory support, temperature regulation, serial examinations, and radiographs. After a bit with the neonatologists, in their makeshift NICU unit, Jameela came alive, discovering her new world — with shouts of joy or pure terror, who was to know. 

All the participants by that time knew they had delivered a live baby gorilla. 

“It was incredible how similar this mother-infant pair was compared to what I see in the hospital for babies born under similar circumstances,” Ursprung says. “The baby needed critical respiratory support for a few hours post-delivery, but as she transitioned to life outside the womb, she stabilized quite nicely. She had so many features typical of a slightly premature human baby.” 

The clever zoo staff, meanwhile, painted Sekani’s toenails and fingernails to distract her from her incisions. They’ll also put macaroni in their fur to distract them. The finger painting worked, however. “Sekani was a model patient,” Cannizzo says.  

“I remember I left the zoo. I was there pretty much all afternoon,” Erwin says. “We had a dinner party that night. And I’m just exhausted and I want to go. And I want to tell these people … . This was mind blowing.  

“We were thrilled, especially when she started doing great. We’re like, ‘This is the coolest thing. Did we just do [this]? The shock factor of what just happened. And then showing up to work on Monday and someone asks, ‘Well, how was your weekend?’ ‘It was fine.’”