Mother Opts to Go Public for the Good of the Public

She’s a young mother, torn.

“Everybody wants 20 minutes of fame,” she says. “I don’t.”

But she also has a story to tell, the story of how her baby was switched with another last summer at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange and how another woman nursed her 2-day-old son for about 30 minutes. Both families were aghast but didn’t go public because the hospital assured them it couldn’t happen again.

Then came the news last Sunday that St. Joseph had discharged a baby to the wrong parents. Again, two mothers had breast-fed the wrong baby.

The news hit the mother involved in last June’s incident, who is 28, like a thunderbolt.

She got on the phone Monday morning with the woman who had mistakenly nursed her child last summer. The two had become friends by virtue of sharing a post-delivery room and had stayed in touch after the baby switch.

“When the story broke and I saw it on the front page Monday, I was shocked,” the young mother says. “I called [the other family], and they said, ‘We were waiting for you to wake up, because we were going to call you.’ But again this time, we said, ‘Let it ride.’ We said, ‘Things happen.’

“But I started thinking and thinking, and by Tuesday I thought, ‘I need to do something about this. It’s not right. It’s not sitting well with me.’ ”

Although they felt let down by hospital administrators who had promised it wouldn’t happen again, she and her husband still were reluctant to go public. I heard about her situation from a third party.

On Friday at their home in Orange, the couple--insisting on anonymity--told their story, beginning with the moment a nurse brought two babies into the hospital room about 5 a.m. that day in June.

The mother left the baby she thought was hers sleeping in a bassinet. Meanwhile, her roommate began nursing the other baby.

Almost immediately, the mother who was nursing remarked that the infant she thought was her son seemed to have the other baby’s coloration. “And I said, ‘Your son sounds like mine. He’s making the same noises,’ ” she recalls.

Still, it didn’t occur to them that the nurse had switched the babies. Even when the other mother saw that the child she was nursing had been circumcised--and her son had not been--her first thought was that someone had circumcised her son during the night.

The two women soon came to a joint realization that they had each other’s baby. “It’s so hard to tell when you’re a new mom,” she says. “You see the new baby, and they’re all wrapped up, and all you see is their little face. I can see how a mom wouldn’t know if it was her baby or not.”

But she was stunned to discover the switch.

“I just sat there,” she relates. “My son was on my lap [after the mothers discovered the mix-up], and I looked at him for, like, an hour. I didn’t know what to do with him.

“The nurse didn’t want to get in trouble. She didn’t know what to do. She was in shock too. We said, ‘We have to tell somebody.’ The nurse was visibly upset, and we felt bad for her, obviously. We thought, ‘Oh, my God, our husbands are going to freak.’ ”

Almost immediately, the hospital began making amends. She got private nursing care over the next several hours before being discharged. She and her husband met with hospital administrators, who said that procedures would be changed to prevent future mix-ups.

“I know mistakes can happen,” the woman says. “I had excellent care at St. Joe’s. Every nurse I came across was wonderful as far as being caring and kind. The technology was awesome.”

The incident was behind the couple until last Sunday’s disclosure sent the woman back mentally to the scene of her temporary nightmare.

“I know about infection control and bodily fluid exchange,” she says. “That was my first concern. Then it was the bonding thing. I had never [had a baby] before. . . . I couldn’t believe it. It was like I didn’t want to hold him for a while. It’s hard to explain, because I still loved him, but--it’s very weird. It’s like you aren’t bonded with him or something. I can’t even explain it. It’s almost impossible to put into words.”

Unsettling as the switch was, both couples decided against going public. “We knew we could do something if we wanted to, make a big fuss,” the woman’s husband says. “But we wanted to enjoy our child. We were tired. We wanted to go home and enjoy our new baby rather than take this negative thing. We wanted to focus on what was positive.”

I asked how long the mix-up bothered them.

“I’d say it passed after about a week,” the woman says. “We talked a lot about it the first week, but because we knew the other couple and they had their health histories checked, we just said it was one of those things.”

Until it happened again last Sunday.

“We couldn’t believe the stupidity,” the father says. “The same mistake. It’s not like this is a minor mistake.”

After I first wrote about their situation for Saturday’s paper, I contacted the mother again Saturday morning. By then, she had read that a hospital official cited two other incidents in recent months of potential mix-ups that were caught before mothers got the wrong babies.

“I feel bad for the hospital, but something’s got to change,” the mother says. “If they’ve had two major and two minor incidents since June, something’s not right. To me, even a close call is too dangerous.”

She and her husband want a foolproof system at St. Joseph, partly because the couple may well have future children delivered there.

She laments the hospital’s bad publicity but is equally concerned that its maternity system be improved.

“Even if there is human error, you’ve got to make it so it’s not so,” she says. “Even if it means children stay in the room the whole time with their parents, that’s fine.

“Other than for that, I’m over the whole thing.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.