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For The Washington Post

Virginia Oliver

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HCA Healthcare's Lakeview Hospital

Kelsey Poll and her fiancé, Tyler West, were looking through her baby pictures at her family’s home in Layton, Utah, this year when West suddenly stopped and looked surprised.

He pointed to a photo of a woman tending to her as a newborn and said: “Hey, I think that’s my mom. It looks like she was your nurse!”

A photo from June 2001 showed a nurse preparing Poll’s feet to take footprints for her birth certificate.

West said he looked at his betrothed in astonishment as they sat together on the sofa that day in mid-March.

Stacy Poll

“We were both pretty shocked,” he said.

He and Poll quickly flipped through the photo album to find her birth certificate showing that she was born at Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful, Utah, on June 15, 2001.

West, 23, said he immediately recognized the penmanship on the document.

“I told Kelsey, ‘That’s definitely my mom’s handwriting,’” he said of his mother, labor and delivery nurse Mary Ann West.

After the astounded couple looked through the scrapbook that day, they rushed to the basement to retrieve a video taken by Poll’s dad at the hospital on the day of her birth. Sure enough, it showed Tyler West’s mother standing next to Kelsey’s mom, Stacy Poll, as she held her newborn daughter.

“I thought it was really cool — it made me feel grateful to know I had this tie to my new family,” said Kelsey Poll, 22. “I always wanted to have a good relationship with my future parents, and it also confirmed that I want to be with Tyler for the rest of my life.”

Matt Poll

The odds were long that Tyler West’s mother would help bring his future bride into the world.

Around 400 babies are born at Lakeview Hospital every year, according to hospital spokeswoman Brittany Glas. The year Kelsey Poll was born, her family and Tyler West’s family lived about 10 miles apart, in two different counties near Salt Lake City.

Tyler West was born at a different hospital from Kelsey Poll, and the two went to different high schools. Their paths did not cross until August 2021, when he walked into the credit union where she was working as a teller in Davis County, Utah.

“When I left, I thought, ‘I have to go back and get her number,’” he recalled, noting that they dated about a year and a half before he proposed on Feb. 12, 2023.

She hired him as a caregiver for her family. They fell in love.

Mary Ann West has worked at Lakeview Hospital as a labor and delivery nurse for about 23 years, she said. She remembers the day Stacy Poll was in labor at the hospital, expecting her third child.

“I remember her because she was so nervous about having a third baby and how her other two young kids were going to handle it,” said West, 49.

“I’d had Tyler the year before, and he was my third [child],” she said. “I told Stacy about that, and how my kids had reacted to their new little brother. ‘You’ve got this, girl,’ I told her. ‘You can do this.’ We bonded over that, and it helped her to become more relaxed.”

West also remembered the day Poll’s daughter was born for another reason.

It was discovered during Stacy Poll’s labor that she had a condition called <a href="https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24111-velamentous-cord-insertion#:~:text=What%20is%20velamentous%20cord%20insertion,share%20nutrients%20with%20the%20fetus." target=_blank>velamentous cord insertion</a> — a complication that occurs in about <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3517836/" target=_blank>1 percent</a> of single-birth pregnancies in which the umbilical cord from a fetus doesn’t properly connect to the <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/pregnancy-week-by-week/in-depth/placenta/art-20044425" target=_blank>placenta</a>.

Earlier ultrasounds hadn’t picked up Stacy Poll’s condition, said West, noting that exposed blood vessels from Kelsey’s umbilical cord were at dangerous risk of bursting and bleeding.

“It’s a pretty scary thing, and it’s the only time I’d ever seen anything like it,” West said. “We were all relieved and happy when everything went perfectly and Kelsey was born healthy, without complications.”

More than two decades later, when Kelsey Poll and Tyler West introduced their parents to each other at a pre-wedding dinner — before their discovery of the coincidence at Kelsey Poll’s birth — the two moms said they each thought the other looked familiar.

“Kelsey had told me that Mary Ann was a labor and delivery nurse, and she and Tyler had joked that maybe she’d brought me ice chips when I was in the hospital,” Stacy Poll said.

“I thought the odds were slim that she’d have been there,” added Stacy Poll, 47. “But in the back of my mind, I guess I wondered, ‘Could it be?’”

She said she recalled appreciating how her delivery nurse had listened to her concerns and helped to calm her while she was in labor.

That’s why she made sure to include a photo of her favorite nurse in her daughter’s baby book, she said.

“She was with me the entire time, telling me, ‘Honey, it’s going to be okay,’” Stacy Poll recalled. “When Kelsey was born, she handed her to me and said, ‘Welcome to the world, princess.’ I just always remembered her kindness.”

Stacy Poll said she was housecleaning on the day that Tyler West recognized his mom’s face in Kelsey’s photo album. She called the realization “an incredible moment.”

Abbe White Photography

When West and Poll got married last month, on May 25, they had a <a href="https://www.ksl.com/article/50659359/how-a-lakeview-hospital-nurse-met-her-daughter-in-law-decades-before-her-son-did" target=_blank>fun story</a> to tell their guests.

His dog ran off after his wife died. A remarkable rescue ensued.

“I’d met his parents and always felt really comfortable around them,” Kelsey Poll said. “Knowing now that Mary Ann helped to deliver me makes me feel even closer to her.”

West said she was delighted to learn about her early connection with her future daughter-in-law.

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“I’m just so thankful that Tyler found her and she’s now part of our family,” she said. “We’ve loved her from Day 1, and it’s like it was meant to be. Kelsey is the one.”

Cathy Free is a human interest reporter who specializes in stories of humanity. She has written for The Washington Post's Inspired Life section since 2018. 

Cathy Free

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Nurse learned that baby she delivered is now her daughter-in-law

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