A Nurse Met Her Future Daughter-In-Law 22 Years Before Her Son Did After Saving Her Life At Birth
It was a full-circle moment for the two families, and the newlyweds knew that they were meant to be.
Alena Ozerova / Shutterstock / Instagram After a labor and delivery nurse saved a newborn’s life, she never would have imagined that they would come face to face again 22 years later. And she certainly did not ever imagine that the baby would be her future daughter-in-law.
But as fate would have it, that is exactly what happened to a couple in Utah who discovered that the groom’s mother was the one responsible for sparing his bride’s life at birth.
Mary Ann West delivered her future daughter-in-law, Kelsey Poll-West, 22 years ago at Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful, Utah.
Stacy Poll arrived at the maternity ward to give birth to her third child in June 2001. Despite being a mother twice already, Stacy was feeling overwhelmed. She worked full-time, just had her second child nine months prior, and would now have three children under the age of three.
“I was really nervous because we weren’t expecting to have a third so quickly,” she told KSL.com. “I was really overwhelmed and worried about how we were going to handle having another baby.”
Photo: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock
That’s when Stacy met the nurse on duty, Mary Ann West, who stepped in and put her anxieties at ease. “[West] said that it was going to be OK, and that she was a working mom of three kids,” Stacy recalls. “She was very comforting, and I was so grateful for that.”
West spent the night by Stacy’s side, telling her about the baby boy she had at the time. However, at one point during her labor, Stacy claimed that “something didn’t feel right,” prompting the nurse to check her.
West, the nurse, saved the mom and baby from a rare and serious birth complication.
It was then that West discovered that the expectant mother had a rare condition called velamentous cord insertion, where the umbilical cord blood vessels insert into the amniotic sac instead of the placenta. Left unnoticed and untreated, the condition could result in blood loss, and even death, for both mother and baby.
The birth was one that West remembers to this day since she had never experienced a complication like it during past deliveries or any delivery since. West’s quick thinking and intervention saved both Stacy's and her unborn baby’s lives.
West was even one of the first people to welcome the baby girl into the world. “She touched Kelsey before I did,” Stacy shares. “She put her on my stomach and let me see that she had 10 fingers and 10 toes.”
Once Stacy and her new baby girl, Kelsey, were sent on their way, they never expected to cross paths again.
Photo: Lolostock / Shutterstock
Years later, Kelsey Poll and West’s son, Tyler, met and fell in love.
While Poll was working at a bank, Tyler came in one day to deposit a check. The two began chatting, one thing led to another, and they began dating soon after that. After falling in love, Poll and Tyler decided that the time was right to introduce their families to one another and start the wedding planning process.
During the meeting, West mentioned that she worked as a nurse at Lakeview Hospital since the summer of 2001, the same year Poll was born. Stacy could not help but wonder if her daughter’s future mother-in-the law was the same nurse that saved her life over two decades earlier.
“She looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure if it was her or not,” she says. She decided to break open old photo albums and go back to pictures of the day that Kelsey was born.
It was after looking at a photo of the comforting nurse inking baby Kelsey’s feet for footprints that Stacy realized that West was in fact the nurse who saved both of them. After looking at the photo, Tyler confirmed that it was his mother who was the nurse.
The couple believes that their meeting was 'meant to be.'
“It was one of those things that confirmed to me that Tyler was someone I wanted to be with for the rest of my life, and it also made me feel closer to his mom and his family,” Poll-West revealed.
West is thrilled to welcome the baby girl she met 22 years ago as an official member of her family. “She really is a miracle,” the nurse said of her new daughter-in-law. “It really does feel like it was meant to be.”
Stacy is also happy to have the woman who encouraged her and saved her and her daughter’s life now in theirs forever. “She doesn’t know how worried I was from the get-go about to have my third baby. I was not prepared for it. For her to come in and say, ‘You’ve got this, girl’ and to hold my hand through it all... and now our kids are married,” she says.
“She’s been a gem through it all. For Kelsey to have both of her moms bond with her is the most peaceful gift.”
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.