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Years of Patience Pay Off; Father, Daughter United

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From Associated Press

A woman’s search for the father she had never seen ended when she was sent to draw blood from a heart patient and discovered that he was the man she had been looking for.

Beverly Blake, a medical technician, always carried a copy of her birth certificate with her father’s name, Charles L. Cole.

She searched for the name Cole through telephone directories, groups that reunite parents and children and admission lists at hospitals where she worked.

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“I would think: ‘Where is he? What is he like? What does he do?’ I knew the man was out there,” she said.

Blake’s parents were divorced before she was born, and she had never seen a picture of her father.

“As the years went by, I got antsier,” she said. “I knew he was getting older, and I didn’t want him to pass away.”

Last month, the 41-year-old phlebotomist was sent to draw blood from a patient in intensive care at Loyola University Medical Center in the Chicago suburb of Maywood. The man was recovering from a heart attack, and his chart identified him as Charles L. Cole, 69, born in Harrisburg, Ill.

Because of the patient’s health, Blake said she did not immediately tell him what she suspected.

Blake said she called her mother’s brother and had him talk with the patient by telephone. The uncle’s conversation verified that the patient was her father, she said.

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Blake later entered Cole’s room and called him “Daddy.”

“He said, ‘C’mon over here.’ I jumped onto his bed. We just held each other in his room until midnight,” she said.

“I started living all over again from that moment,” Blake added.

Cole, a former Marine who spent much of his life traveling the world, said he never knew he had a daughter.

“It’s a new chapter in my life,” he said. “I feel wanted. I just wish I had known about her before now.”

Blake lives in a suburb near her father’s Maywood home.

“We’re not trying to catch up on lost time,” Blake said. “We’re just thinking ahead about all the happy time we have to spend together.”

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