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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Times Sure Have Changed: 50 Years of Deliveries

It was much smaller then, but so was I. Valley Presbyterian Hospital was a newborn 50 years ago. I arrived there about a year- and-a-half later. To mark its 50th anniversary, the hospital is hosting a series of events including a birthday party for babies who drew their first breaths in the Van Nuys medical center. I attended the March 24 party, to cover the story, as part of the story. The party included cake, punch, balloons, plus 50th anniversary-labeled chocolate bars and coffee mugs printed with the message “I was born at Valley Presbyterian Hospital.” At the party, I met two people born at the hospital before me. Both are tangentially involved in health care. Valley Presbyterian’s first born was Katherine Hollingsworth, now living in Truckee, California. Hollingsworth is a registered lobbyist for Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company Ltd., in Osaka, Japan, for whom she “lobbies for access to health care.” The other “charter baby” attending was Teresa Van-Zeller of Woodland Hills. She delivered her two children at Valley Presbyterian and is now a certified hypnotherapist and a “hypnobirthing” practitioner and trainer helping mothers manage the pain of childbirth with hypnosis. Hollingsworth said she has been “suffering over the idea of turning 50,” but this focus has put a shine on that turn of the calendar and a shine upon her face. Hospital CEO Al Greene spoke briefly, giving some statistics. In 1958, he said there were about 150 births total. Nowadays, that is an average week. Then there were 60 beds. Now there are 350. Then there were 130 employees. Now there are 1,250 people on the payroll. “The cost of a birth averaged about $200. Now that’s about the price of an aspirin,” he joked, “but we have great aspirin.” He quoted a neonatal doctor saying that in 1958, 95 percent of the babies in intensive care would not have survived. When it was built, Valley Presbyterian was celebrated for its innovative circular design. Additional buildings have obscured its three cylindrical wings. When I was born, there was just one. My parents remember much about that late July day. It would have been a bright, hot day when they drove up in the late afternoon with my mom, Norene, already in heavy labor. “I couldn’t get out of the car,” she said. My father, Donald, ran inside the hospital to get help. Hospital staff came out with a gurney, loaded her on and then sailed down the halls to the delivery room. “My hair was flying,” Mom said. My father was armed with a stack of Readers’ Digests, prepared for the wait with the experience of my siblings’ births. My brother and sister, a set of twins, were born after a 30-something-hour stretch of labor, and he was prepared to wait. That was, of course, decades before husbands were regularly in the room for the birth of their children. Dad said that he filled out the paperwork to admit Mom into the hospital and in the few minutes that it took, I had been born. “I took the Readers’ Digests back to the car,” Dad said. I was 9 pounds, 7 ounces and 24 inches long. The bill was “about $150,” Dad said, which was vastly more expensive than the birth of my oldest brother, born five years earlier. My parents’ first son cost $7. Now, that’s about the price of a huge bottle of aspirin, at a big box discount store.

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