ANAHEIM : Celebrating Some Small Successes

At the end of 1989, Chris and Deanna Peterson packed up all their worldly belongings and moved out of their comfortable La Habra apartment, sacrificing family, friends and a typical Orange County lifestyle for a “shack of an apartment” in distant Napa Valley.

On Tuesday, more than a year later, they showed off the reason why: 18-week-old Lindsay Peterson, a technological miracle with a sunny disposition and pink polka-dotted outfits. Lindsay is the product of artificial insemination, a process that cost the Petersons close to $4,000, which they managed to save only after moving out of high-rent Orange County.

“But she’s worth much more than that,” said Deanna Peterson with maternal pride, as her daughter gurgled in reply.

The Petersons were among 60 people--most of them proud parents--who gathered at Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim on Tuesday for a party celebrating the successes of the hospital’s program to treat infertility. In a room decorated with souvenir Easter baskets, those successes were in evidence everywhere--crawling out of prams, cooing on the Easter bunny’s lap, taking swipes at balloons dangling from the ceiling.

The program has helped more than 50 women bear children since it first began in October, 1988, under the direction of Dr. David G. Diaz. Diaz, an obstetrician-gynecologist who professes to having a fascination “with the basic science of fertilization,” had just arrived in Orange County after a successful fellowship on the East Coast.

Within days, his first patient was on the doorstep.

Ruthmarie Sandoval and her husband, Robert, had tried for 3 1/2 years to have a child. “My whole system had shut down,” recalled Sandoval, a 31-year-old former Fullerton resident who flew in from Denver to attend Tuesday’s festivities.

Diaz performed a hysterosalpingogram, a diagnostic test that had the effect of “cleaning out” Sandoval’s reproductive tract and enabling her to conceive--which she did within a few weeks.

“They ran a (pregnancy) test, and (Diaz) said, ‘Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,’ ” Sandoval said with a laugh. “I went back and told my husband, and we both said, ‘No way.’ And then I think I cried.”

But there were no tears Tuesday--only the usual motherly admonitions for 18-month-old Robby, a blond bundle of curiosity whose hands grabbed at all objects within reach.

Across the room, Shelley Humphrey was armed with a camera and doing her best to wheedle a smile from her twins as the two boys jostled around on the Easter bunny’s lap. Humphrey, 29, was the program’s first patient to be successfully impregnated through in-vitro fertilization, ending “three years of misery” of failed attempts at natural conception.

A single mother who lives in Cypress, Humphrey said parenthood has turned out to be more satisfying than she had imagined.

“It’s better than I thought it’d be,” she said, her eye on 9-month-old Peter as he crawled through a throng of party-goers. “I’d expected it to be good, but now that they’re here, I’m in love with them.”