Tale of 2 Babies: What Can ‘Never Happen to You’ Did

For years, Carolyn and her husband, Daryl, tried to conceive a child of their own. When that finally happened, it seemed a gift direct from God.

The pregnancy, however, was rough. Carolyn was hospitalized halfway through, and by as early as the fourth month, she was unable to walk.

Still, all that mattered little in the early morning hours of Dec. 15. The couple’s son, healthy and weighing more than 8 pounds, was born.

“The first night I had him home, I was up all night,” says Carolyn, who is 32. “He would cuddle with me. I would be holding him in my arms and he would lift his little head and just stare at me. I was extremely happy. God, I loved him so much. . . .”

Carolyn stops here because her eyes, once again, are welling with tears. Daryl, seated with us around the kitchen table in the couple’s Costa Mesa home, tightens his lip and looks down.

“I can just see his little eyes, the look that he gave me,” Carolyn goes on. “You know that look that they give you. I can still see his face.”

That face, as we talk, is gone.

The baby asleep in the next room, chubby with a full head of dark hair, is Carolyn and Daryl’s son, but he is not the baby who shared Carolyn’s hospital room, nor the one that the couple took home.

Carolyn and Daryl, who asked that I not print their last name, were presented with another couple’s child within hours after their son was born at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana. The other couple, likewise, was given theirs.

Neither couple had any idea that anything was wrong. It was the holiday season, and the parents had the best gifts yet. Hospital volunteers presented each baby with an infant-size Christmas stocking. Many photographs were shot; there were smiles all around.

Even when Carolyn discovered, three days after giving birth, that the baby she had taken home was wearing a wristband with another mother’s name, she assumed that it was simply a meaningless mistake.

“I wasn’t going to call the hospital,” she says. “But I mentioned it to my husband. I said, ‘Should I call?’ and he said, ‘Whatever you want to do.’ So then I thought, ‘Oh, why not?’ It was just one of those things.”

The nurse who took Carolyn’s call also initially dismissed the notion that anything could be awry. The other couple has a Spanish surname and Carolyn and Daryl do not.

“But then I told her that I’m Hispanic,” Carolyn says. “So then she said that they’d call me back.”

Western Medical Center won’t comment on exactly how the mix-up took place, nor on much of anything else because the hospital says that would be a breach of patients’ trust. There is also a chance that the hospital may be sued.

And John Boop, the corporation’s vice president for community affairs, says the hospital has checked and found no record of anything like this ever happening there before.

But, of course, there are doubts--in Carolyn and Daryl’s minds, and in most every other parent’s as well.

This is the stuff of nightmares, jokes and tales of stranger-than-truth. For Carolyn, especially, now there is no such thing as: “It can never happen to you.”

“Finally, later that night, the hospital found the other couple and called us all back in,” Carolyn says.

“The pediatrician who was there told us that he was sure we had the wrong baby. . . . I didn’t believe it. Honest to God, I believed he was my son. When I realized they were serious, I was scared half to death. I told them, ‘You are not taking my baby back!’ ”

It was then that the testing began. But when routine blood typing couldn’t provide a definitive answer, the babies and their parents were admitted to the hospital for more exhaustive tests.

“They brought both babies into the nursery and both sets of parents came in,” Daryl says, recalling the scene. “And the other father looked at his (true) son and started to cry. Both of them immediately took to him right away.”

Daryl, too, says that he sensed which of the babies was really his.

He was in the delivery room with his wife and now he saw that his real son had more hair than the baby they took home.

Daryl had the same thought before--he noticed his son’s hair moments after birth--but felt his observation was too insignificant to even speak out loud. In the delivery room, after all, he had been extremely tired. And both babies, only an ounce apart in weight, looked remarkably alike.

Still, Daryl was confused. The son he thought was his own was gone from his home. When he saw the empty bassinet in his living room, he broke down in tears. It was the first time that his wife had ever seen this 35-year-old man cry.

Carolyn, meantime, was still certain she had unwittingly set the stage for a monstrous hoax. The first time she saw her real son was minutes after delivery when a nurse held him, wrapped in a blanket and wearing a cap, and quickly passed him in front of her face. She had never even seen his hair.

Now, in the nursery, almost four days later, she did not recognize the baby to whom she gave birth.

“I had a hard time even going near my real baby,” she says.

The facts of this story, in black and white, end about here. There was a mistake, it was corrected, and everybody went home.

It appears that somebody at the hospital tagged each baby with an incorrect ankle bracelet after each had left the delivery room. The parents did not even see the tag on the wrists, attached in the delivery room and each bearing the true mother’s name, because the newborns’ clothing fit over their tiny hands as well.

When each mother checked out of the hospital at about the same time, a nurse looked only at the ankle tags and they matched those on the wrong mothers’ wrists. It’s what most people would call a series of honest mistakes.

Except that this tale is not as tidy as that.

“I feel like I had two babies,” Carolyn says. “And that one of them has died. . . . I think about the other baby all the time. I think to myself, ‘My God, what if something happens to him?’ I think nobody could love him, care for him, like I did.”

And Carolyn fears for her real son, constantly checking to make sure he is all right. The nightmares, in which someone calls from the hospital to say it was all a mistake, haven’t stopped yet.

Carolyn’s 10-year-old son, hers from a previous marriage, isn’t quite sure what to think. He warmed immediately to the first child, but now his mother says he’s cool to the one that really shares his blood.

“He won’t express his feelings,” she says. “I think he is afraid to get close because they might take him away as well.”

Carolyn pauses here and wipes again at her reddened eyes.

She cannot stand the thought of her baby, nursed on another mother’s milk, being taken to another family’s home. She’ll never know what that was like.

And the idea of seeing her own photographs of the other baby, tucked inside his hospital Christmas stocking, is still too much to bear. She has decided not to develop the film yet.

So what if Carolyn had never made that first call? Would she still be caring for the other baby as her own? That, of course, is impossible to know.

Or what if it had taken years to find out the truth?

That’s what happened to two families in Florida whose daughters were switched in a hospital maternity ward in December, 1978. The biological parents of Kimberly Mays, now 11 years old, began uncovering the truth two years ago, shortly before the daughter they raised as their own died of a heart defect.

“I want to make sure this does not happen to anyone again,” Carolyn says. “How I feel, I don’t know if anyone can really understand.”