SWITCHED BABIES

#4/27 ("Grey's Anatomy" had no Nurse-Story like this!). From "Secrets of Men and Women: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QKBKNMQ (w/illustrations by C.G. Simonds (<https://www.cgsimondssculpture.com/>).

SWITCHED BABIES

Nothing the 24-year-old nurse learned in school could have prepared her for the problem she encountered on her night shift at the hospital. The entire evening had been extremely hectic, with one pregnant mother after another delivering babies. She had made a fairly simple mistake of putting the wrong identification bracelet on the wrong baby, switching the infants in their tiny cribs. They looked so much alike, little white bodies, little penises, little ears, little round mouths gasping for air between crying fits, little feet wiggling little toes, that anybody would have been hard-pressed to tell them apart. So when she had put them down for a second, together on the same clean sheet, she had forgotten which was which. So she took a guess, quickly clamped on two ID bracelets, one for Mr. A and one for Mr. B. In two seconds flat she changed the destinies of two families in Buffalo, New York.

How did the fumbling nurse finally catch her error? Just call it woman's intuition. The next morning while making her rounds, the nurse first came across baby B and his mother. Ever so patiently the mother tried to cuddle her new son, but the baby just kept crying and squirming, trying to break her grip. On the chart another night nurse had written in that the baby had "problems with gas." Surely that would explain the fidgeting and restlessness. But the young nurse began to suspect her dreadful mistake. Sure enough, coming upon baby A and his mother, the scene repeated itself. The baby was crying, refusing to eat. With her job on the line, the nurse kept quiet. Water under the bridge. But in her diary she had been keeping since childhood the nurse wrote in the two names, Mr. A and Mr. B. She just figured that somewhere the truth should be known.

Every once in a while, throughout her medical career, she would glance at the names and the date in her diary, adding up their ages. When she turned 40 she thought of how they must now be teenagers. At 44 she knew they must be 20. Whenever she read the newspaper she always had an eye out for their names, wondering if she would read about how a Mr. B raped some woman, or how a Mr. A robbed a bank. After all, it had been obvious to her that the babies had hated being with the wrong mothers. Over and over again she repeated the possible scenarios of their lives. Guilt became a constant companion in her later years. She even found their names in the phone book. But she died before she could make the calls.