California Nurse Realizes Her New Co-Worker Was Her Patient 28 Years Ago

When Vilma Wong saw the face of a new resident nurse doing his rounds in the hospital she had worked in for decades, he was nothing but a stranger to her. But when she heard his name, she suddenly remembered him all too well.

As reported by Fox News, the pediatric nurse at Stanford Children’s Health – Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in Palo Alto, California, had been the primary care nurse to little Brandon Seminatore 28 years ago, when the tiny baby was born 11 weeks early. He had weighed in at just 2 pounds 6 ounces.

Despite the nearly three decades in between, and the thousands of babies Wong has since cared for after Seminatore was discharged, she immediately recognized his name when she heard it. People reported that Wong had come across a second-year resident tending to a baby in an incubator, and decided to introduce herself and ask his name.

She was taken aback by his response and quickly asked him another question.

“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,” said the 54-year-old nurse. “I then got very suspicious because I remember being the primary nurse to a baby with the same last name.”

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As it became more and more clear that the grown man standing in front of her had been the tiny baby she had tended to in his greatest hour of need, she asked one final question that made him realize who she is. Wong asked Seminatore if his father was a police officer.

“There was a big silence, and then he asked if I was Vilma.”

Seminatore described meeting the nurse who had taken such good care of him as an infant as a “surreal experience,” adding that “she cares deeply for her patients, to the point that she was able to remember a patient’s name almost three decades later.”

Wong was touched to see that he had grown up to take care of “the same population he was part of when he was born.”

The 28-year-old texted his father shortly after meeting Wong to tell the retired police officer of the incredible coincidence, and David Seminatore then found an old photo he had taken of Wong holding his son as a tiny baby while in the NICU.

“As a nurse, it’s kind of like your reward,” Wong said.