The Day I Was Born

Me as a young baby--probably a few months old

One of my goals for this year is to work on my personal history. I thought maybe the easiest way to accomplish this goal would be to do it in short installments. I have a list of "interview" questions I picked up somewhere and I've decided to attempt to answer each question--one at a time--in a blog post. We'll see how far I get!

The first question (actually set of questions) on the list is: "What year were you born? On what date? What day of the week was it? Where were you born? Did your parents tell you anything about the day you were born?"

So here goes...

I was born on July 5, 1968. I looked it up once and discovered that date was a Friday. I think I was born around 2:00 am. I was born in Covina, Los Angeles County, California. I've heard quite a few stories about the day I was born because the circumstances were a bit unique. I like to say that I was a surprise...in more ways than one. For starters, I was born about 9 weeks before my due date--I should have been born in early September rather than early July. But if that wasn't enough, I am also the second baby girl born to my parents that day...and they didn't know they were having twins.

That's hard to comprehend in this day and age of highly advanced and accurate ultrasounds, but when I was born they didn't have that kind of technology. (Makes me feel old!) I don't think my parents were totally unprepared for the possibility of twins...twins run in the family and my mom(who was highly experienced with pregnancy by this time) certainly had some suspicions that something unusual was going on. She even asked the doctor if she might be having twins a few weeks before my sister and I were born, but after listening again and only picking up one heartbeat, he insisted that she was just having "a big baby". It wasn't until after my sister was born that he discovered that he was wrong.

Both of my parents say they don't remember being incredibly surprised when they found out there were two instead of one, but my dad says he must have looked surprised. He asked a nurse for information about my mom and was told "Oh, the first baby has arrived. We're just waiting on the second one." My dad had not had a chance to reply when the nurse said "Oh, you didn't know you were having twins... did you?"

Because we were so premature, my sister and I were both very tiny. She weighed 2 lbs, 15 ozs and I weighed 2 lbs, 11 3/4 ozs. My dad said we looked like little skeletons wrapped in a thin layer of skin. He said he could count our ribs from across the room. We caused our parents a good deal of worry those first few weeks, I'm sure. We were so small that the doctors would not even give them an estimate of our chances of survival. Although we were in fairly stable condition, they said that our condition could deteriorate rapidly without any warning. I was having trouble breathing at birth and sometime in those first couple of hours, they decided to move me to another hospital where they thought I would get better care. My sister and I were born at Covina Community Hospital but I was moved that first day to the USC Medical Center. They specialized in the care of premature babies. I was transferred by ambulance; my dad followed the ambulance in his car so that he could fill out the paperwork to admit me. My mom didn't get to see me before they transferred me. They had put her to sleep for the delivery because I was turned the wrong way and she was still drugged up when they moved me. She had to wait until she was discharged from the hospital a few days later before she could see me. (She told me once that even though she had never seen me that she was worried sick about me--the power of mother love!) I stayed in the hospital for 5 weeks. Fortunately, I progressed well and didn't have any major set backs.

My parents were able to visit during those 5 weeks, but things were very different then--they were not allowed to hold me at all and could only see me through a window. (It used to bother me that no one was holding me when I was a newborn, but then one day my mom told me about the day she brought me home and how sad this little Asian nurse was because they were taking away "her" baby!) The nurses were not allowed to give my parents progress reports over the phone--they had to talk to a doctor or go to the hospital to see for themselves. The two hospitals where my sister and I stayed were not very close together. I imagine it must have been quite trying for them to have to drive to both hospitals to see how we were doing. They had five other kids at home to take care of, as well.

I'm sure it was helpful, in a way, for us to be in the hospital for those weeks--it gave them time to get everything ready for another baby that they hadn't expected. They were very excited when my sister and I finally got to come home, though. Although I was the smaller of the two, I got to come home first because the weight requirement at my hospital was lower. My sister Shellie, who was nearly 5 years old at the time, remembers the day I came home. My mom was giving her a bath when the phone rang. She says when my mom came back from answering the phone that she had her purse in her hands and looked very excited. "The hospital called and said Annette can come home! I'm going to get her!" my mom cried, and left--leaving Shellie in the tub, wondering if she could get out or not. At least, that's how Shellie remembers it! Maybe it wasn't quite that dramatic. ;) My sister Amy came home a few days later and then the fun really began!

That's the story of how my earthly life began.