"I remember being the primary nurse to a baby with the same last name"
A nurse in California has discovered that her new colleague was once a baby she looked after almost three decades ago.
CBS reports that California nurse Vilma Wong was recently reunited with a baby she cared for 28 years ago.
Wong, 54, had looked after Brandon Seminatore after his mother’s emergency C-section. Now, he has returned to the hospital as a colleague in the same hospital.
Seminatore was born in Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, where Wong has worked for 32 years. As a two pound and six ounce baby, Seminatore spent 40 days in the unit. Wong helped him develop until he was healthy enough to leave the hospital with his parents.
Almost three decades later, Wong saw a new face dressed in scrubs and asked his name. When he told her his name, Wong was shocked.
“I kept asking where he was from and he told me that he was from San Jose, California, and that, as a matter of fact, he was a premature baby born at our hospital,” Wong said. “I then got very suspicious because I remember being the primary nurse to a baby with the same last name.“
Wong recalled his father was a police officer and asked him if he was the same person.
“There was a big silence,” Wong said. “And then he asked if I was Vilma.”
Seminatore said meeting her again was “surreal” but he was touched that he still remembered him considering how many babies she had to look after over the years.
Laura Seminatore, Brandon’s mother, had told her son to look up the nurses that looked after him when he was born.
“They were wonderful nurses,” Laura Seminatore said. “They helped calm a lot of our fears.”
“She cares deeply for her patients, to the point that she was able to remember a patient’s name almost three decades later,” Seminatore added.
Wong said moments like being reunited with Seminatore was “kind of like your reward” for being a caregiver.