Every story of a chance encounter seems magical. The odds of being at the right place at the right time are extremely slim, so the fact that it happens at all is a miracle. What about a chance encounter that happens more than once, though? What about a series of lucky moments that create a beautiful story?
That's precisely what happened to not just one but two families in Utah who found themselves meeting more than once under very different circumstances.
A nurse in Utah realized something incredible about her new daughter-in-law, an encounter they had decades ago with miraculous odds bringing them back together later in life.
Mary Ann West has been a longtime labor and delivery nurse at HCA Healthcare's Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful, Utah. In an interview with Good Morning America, she recalled the day in 2001 when her future daughter-in-law was born, of course, having no knowledge of this at the time.
"Her delivery was a little bit complicated so that's one reason why I remember it from 22 years ago," she explained on the show. "She had a complication with her placenta […] it was very high risk because the cord attached to the baby and then the vessels were just in the amniotic membranes in the bag of water instead of attached with the cord, so it wasn't protected."
This was the only time Mary Ann had ever seen this kind of complication in her 29 years of nursing.
Her daughter-in-law, Kelsey Poll West, is the third child in the West family, something else that Mary Ann remarked about the delivery, as Kelsey's mother, Stacy, was nervous about having three children all under the age of three.
Luckily, Mary Ann was there to comfort her, "I had just given birth to my third a year ago and was just letting her know, 'You got this girl. It's fine, you can do this.' Kind of giving her tips of how to help the older siblings adjust to the new baby, and it was a great experience."
Kelsey would later meet Mary Ann's own third child, Tyler. They met in the summer of 2021 when Kelsey was working at a bank where Tyler went to deposit a check at. They started chatting but didn't immediately try for more.
"It was a really good conversation and he actually left. And I didn't see him for a while, [but] he came back and asked me for my number, and we started going on dates," Kelsey said.
It wasn't until after they got engaged when the two were looking through a book of Kelsey's baby photos, that they saw someone familiar. Tyler's mom.
"We were looking through my baby book to find some pictures for our wedding video … and we see this picture and it's Mary Ann there," Kelsey said. "[Tyler was] like, 'That is my mom.' And it was undeniably Mary Ann."
They also had Kelsey's birth certificate, the handwriting matching Mary Ann's perfectly.
"We were shocked," Mary Ann said. "I was like, this is meant to be. What are the odds that these two kids would find each other and end up getting married and starting their own little family?"
The two families have blended perfectly, with Mary Ann now calling Stacy her best friend. Kelsey has also expressed how grateful she is to have such an amazing mother-in-law, saying, "She was able to help my mom during the time that she was really scared, and that means a lot, because my mom means the world to me. And just to be able to have both of my moms there with me when I was brought into the world is something that not everyone gets to say, and that's something that I'll be forever grateful for, that I have that connection with her and that she has that connection with my mom, too."
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