This doctor from Omaha, Nebraska, knows he’s been delivering babies for quite a while now. In 2017, however, he performed a delivery that hit home just how long he’s been in the business.
Baby girl Hunter-Rose Smith was due on Aug. 16, 2017, the same day her mom was set to turn 21, but just under a week before her expected due date, now-mother Kristina McIntosh started to have bad contractions, so bad, in fact, that baby Hunter-Rose was quivering in the womb.
Kristina explained that a decision was quickly made to go ahead and have the delivery a little early. Her bundle of joy was born on Aug. 12, 2017, via emergency C-section at Bergan Mercy Hospital in Omaha, delivered by a veteran of the trade, Dr. Jorge Sotolongo.
When Kristina and Hunter-Rose’s father, Kyle Smith, got their daughter’s birth certificate, however, they noticed something very interesting.
They realized that Hunter-Rose wasn’t the only person in their family to have been delivered by Dr. Sotolongo.
It turned out that the OB-GYN had delivered mother Kristina 21 years earlier as well, and, two years prior to that, he also delivered her husband, Kyle. Father, mother, and now daughter were all delivered by the same doctor, at Mercy Hospital in Council Bluffs, Iowa, just 15 minutes across the state border.
While neither Kristina nor Kyle could possibly have remembered it, their parents were quick to point out the name on the birth certificate. Kristina’s mother told her that he‘d been great then, just as he’d been great this time round, delivering a healthy Hunter-Rose to her parents.
The couple let Sotolongo know what they'd discovered when he came to check on mother and baby the next day. “I was surprised,” said Dr. Sotolongo. “I realized that I’ve been doing this for a while,” he laughed.
When he asked how everything had gone, Kristina told him things were great—just as they'd been great when he delivered her two decades earlier.
Sotolongo has been practicing in the area for 28 years, and he loves seeing the impact his work has on families. It hadn’t quite hit home just how long he‘d been delivering babies, though, until he learned that he’d delivered all three members of a two-generation family over the course of a 23-year span.
The doctor went ahead and took a picture with the family to commemorate the occasion, joking that he may be around long enough to deliver Hunter-Rose’s future children, as well.
For now, though, it’s certainly a special memory for both the doctor and the family. With that fortuitous coincidence, it seems a bit auspicious for this new member of the family.
