Can You Tell Who’s Older? : New Year’s Day: First baby of 1994 debuts one second after midnight. ‘They planned that one,’ nurse at a rival hospital says with a laugh.
As New Year’s Day dawned in the Southland, teams were assembled for a fabled contest. No, not the Rose Bowl, but the spirited competition among area hospitals to claim the honor of delivering the first baby of the new year.
And the winner, it would seem, is Suburban Medical Center in Paramount, which delivered a healthy 7-pound, 4-ounce boy named Antonio Miajarez one second after midnight.
His mother, Margarita Castaneda, 23, was in good condition after the timely birth. Doctors and nurses in the hospital’s maternity ward, however, were reported to be in a state of high excitement, what with the gaggle of media attention focused on them.
“Actually, I wasn’t called for the delivery until about 11:15 p.m. and I really didn’t think we were going to have the New Year’s baby,” said Dr. Jose De La Rosa, the on-call obstetrician. “Then we started to realize we were getting closer and closer. I have delivered thousands of babies but this was the first one that was on the dot.”
Well, almost on the dot. In any case, no other hospital appears to have come close. Suburban Medical nurses reported receiving an excited call a little past midnight from staff at their sister hospital, Long Beach Memorial, claiming a birth at half a second past midnight. It turned out to be a false alarm.
Long Beach Memorial’s first baby, a girl, didn’t appear until 4:56 a.m., a nursing supervisor there conceded.
Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center trumpeted the arrival of 7-pound, 6-ounce Maiya Paola Martinez, born at 2:01 a.m.
The mother, Marbella Sanchez Martinez, and baby were said to be doing fine. Hospital officials did not let the earlier birth at Suburban Memorial dampen Maiya’s debut. They sent out press releases and invited photographers anyway.
A nursing supervisor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which delivered a healthy 6-pound, 4-ounce girl at 4:01 a.m., suggested, good-naturedly, that perhaps a birth at a second past midnight was not entirely nature’s doing.
“They planned that one,” said the nurse, laughing. “When you’re that close it’s, ‘Don’t push! Don’t push!’ ”
But De La Rosa pleaded innocence.
“No, I didn’t plan it. You can’t really predict these things, you know,” he said. “It was pretty exciting but I don’t think I’m winning any prizes, right?”
