Paramedic Delivers, Collects : Namesake: A grateful Garden Grove mother named her newborn after the firefighter who helped her bring her baby boy into the world.

As a veteran paramedic, Ruben Ruvalcaba always looked forward to the day when he would help deliver a baby.

When the chance finally came, he hadn’t considered that the mother would be so grateful that she would name her newborn after him.

“I hadn’t yet thought of a name because I thought it was going to be a girl,” said the mother, Anna Alvarez, 33, of the unexpected birth Sunday in her Garden Grove apartment.

“Then, when they asked me, I thought, ‘Well, he was the one who helped me deliver it,’ ” explained Alvarez from AMI Medical Center of Garden Grove on Monday.

Young Ruben Alvarez and his mother were returned home Monday. He is a healthy, 7-pound, 2-ounce child with brown eyes and black hair.

“It was great. I was pretty excited,” said a beaming Ruvalcaba as he visited his namesake. “That kind of thing never gets old. I would have liked to have pictures of it.”

Ruvalcaba, of Downey, has assisted in delivering two other babies during his nine-year career with the Garden Grove Fire Department. He is married and has no children.

“A lot of times we get these phone calls, but nine times out of 10, they have enough time to go to the hospital,” Ruvalcaba said.

When firefighters received the phone call Sunday about 4:54 a.m., they were spending a routine shift responding to the usual traffic accidents and stabbings. Firefighters thought someone was hemorrhaging, but when Ruvalcaba arrived he found a woman ready to give birth.

“I thought I would have enough time to go to the hospital, but it was all very quick,” Alvarez said.

Alvarez, who is not married, had asked her roommates to call 911. She was lying on the bathroom floor covered with a sheet when Ruvalcaba appeared, began speaking Spanish and immediately went to work.

“Just as we were preparing, boom! She delivered the baby,” said Capt. Paul Christman, one of four firefighters on scene.

Ruvalcaba cut the umbilical cord, cleaned the baby and handed him to Alvarez. Checking in at the hospital, a clerk asked for the baby’s name. Christman said he “jokingly recommended” that the baby be named after Ruvalcaba.

Alvarez also has an 18-month-old son and an 11-year-old girl.

While delivering babies is common for paramedics, Christman said that it’s the first time in the 18 years he has been with the Fire Department that a mother has named her baby after a paramedic.