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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/DrunkenTree on 2023-08-10 04:24:00.
This all started a bit over a year ago, when Woody and Zeke (Woodrow Wayne and Ezekiel Caine—family names) were not quite two years old. It took me until this week to gather all the pieces of the story and put them in sequence. I’ll try to tell it as it happened, rather than as I learned the different bits.
Pete (I’ll use the last name Smith, to protect all of us) was picking up his boys from a home-operated daycare, run by a lady named Sandra, in July 2022, a miserable hot afternoon. He parked his car at the curb on the residential street, facing the wrong way—technically illegal, but common around here. To keep it cool, he left the engine running while he went inside for the twins. He set Zeke and Woody in their child seats on the back bench seat, and was leaned in buckling up Woody when the front end of his car was rammed by a light pickup truck at street speed. The pickup driver was on his phone and didn’t notice a bright blue car with its doors open!
The driver staggered out, saw the two kids sprawled in the car, and called 911 instantly. He didn’t see Pete at first, because the rearward impact had thrown Pete between the front seats to land head-down in the passenger floor—then a beach towel flung from the back seat landed over him.
So the first ambulance found two toddler boys “alone” in a car, with no adult. Neither seemed badly hurt, but the EMTs didn’t hesitate—they put them on backboards and took them straight to the ER, even before the first police car arrived. The twins were registered as John and James Doe, with temporary medical record numbers; the admission report (I’ve seen it) said “MV accident, no seatbelts.” That was Strike 1.
Pete’s engine, amazingly, was still running, though the radiator was shredded and oil was spilling out. A cop reached the scene just in time to hear the engine seize up and stop. He noticed that, then heard noise from inside the car. Pete had been stunned by the impact, but now, banged around but mostly conscious, was struggling his way out from under the towel. The cop called another ambulance, but tried to take Pete’s statement on the scene.
Pete hardly knew where he was; his only concern was for the twins. The cop hadn’t seen the boys, and didn’t even know they’d been there. The pickup driver, after seeing two toddlers hauled off in an ambulance, had decided to lawyer up and not admit anything. The cop heard Pete asking about his boys, looked at the empty car, and made a note wondering if Pete was stoned or delusional. Strike 2.
The cop also, having heard the car’s engine running, concluded Pete had been driving when struck—possibly on the wrong side of the street. Only the pickup driver’s unwillingness to make any statement at all kept the cop from citing Pete on the spot.
As Pete told me later, the cop kept asking him what led up to the accident. “I told him I was putting the boys in their car seats. He kept asking me, ‘That’s the last thing you remember?’ like he didn’t believe it, and I kept telling him, 'That’s the last thing that happened!” The cop was convinced Pete was driving, and either trauma had temporarily affected his memory—or he was deliberately denying knowing what happened. He made a note of his suspicions. He also saw that the driver’s airbag hadn’t deployed (because Pete wasn’t in the driver’s seat); he noted that as well.
By now the second ambulance had finally arrived—some event downtown, with people getting heatstroke, had ambulance service backed up—and was waiting to take Pete to the ER, so the cop let him go. Pete, who really didn’t know how he got from buckling Woody to wadded beneath terrycloth seashells, was still too confused to just point at the daycare house and say, “Go ask in there!” Amazingly, Sandra, the daycare lady, didn’t hear the crash or see the activity on the street; Woody and Zeke were her last kids that afternoon.
The cop stayed on the scene until the tow truck arrived. The pickup driver volunteered for a breath test, which he passed. Nobody noticed Pete’s cell phone under the front passenger seat. The cop still wasn’t sure who was at fault but, on reflection, decided to cite Pete for not having his children belted in. Strike 3.
When Pete got to the hospital (where his admission report also was marked “MVA, no seatbelt”—Strike 4), he at last learned the twins reached the ER an hour before him, were admitted as Does, and were already seen and pronounced relatively unhurt. But when the ER staff kept him from joining the boys, because he wasn’t carrying proof he was their father, he lost his shit for a few minutes. Security was called, and threatened to have him arrested.
Somebody cool-headed finally got Pete to confirm his car license, which had made it from the first EMTs’ notes to the ER chart. But a note went into Pete’s record: “Patient extremely agitated and unreasonable.” Strike 5. (Look, this isn’t baseball.) When Pete calmed down, he finally thought to have them call Jean, his wife. (He only now missed his phone.) He gave them her number, but they only got voicemail—Jean was on the phone trying to find him.
Pete gave the ER staff Woody and Zeke’s personal information, but because they were in an exam room instead of at the admitting desk it was written down by a nurse, not entered directly into the computer. He gave their first names, middle initials, and date of birth but couldn’t remember their Social Security numbers. “I told them, ‘They were born here. They’ll be in your computer.’” The nurse noted that on the chart for whoever updated the records later—the “in your computer” part, not the “born here” part.
My sister-in-law Jean had discovered Pete wasn’t answering his phone. She called the daycare to find out why Pete and the boys weren’t home yet. Sandra looked out, saw a tow truck just driving off with Pete’s smashed car, and treated Jean to some over-the-phone hysterics. Jean called the cops, got passed to the ambulance service, then directed to the hospital. She arrived just in time to take charge of the twins while Pete was, at last, getting seen by a doctor.
Meanwhile, the admissions desk was entering the twins’ data from the written notes. The computer had an option—probably for accidents—to copy information from one patient to another, so the clerk copied address and family information from Zeke to Woody. But the computer wouldn’t let her copy the date of birth (which seems sensible now; it was surely designed for family members but not twins). She entered Woody’s date of birth from memory—but swapped the month and day. So Zeke was entered as 08/09/2020, but Woody was entered as 09/08/2020.
She noticed the notation “no seatbelts” in the admission. After some hesitation, she checked a flag that said “Suspected child abuse or neglect”.
Then the clerk noticed the “already in the computer” note. She was new enough she didn’t know how to merge these newly-created records into existing records, so she asked a more experienced clerk to help. The first clerk turned to a new arrival in the ER, and the older clerk took over. She’d just arrived for the evening shift, hadn’t seen the twins admitted, had no idea they were toddlers.
Without SSNs, she did a name search: “Ezekiel C Smith”. Because she already had one patient record on screen, and was searching for another one to merge it into, the computer system only showed her one name at a time. The first one that came up was not Zeke—but looked like it was.
By one of those coincidences that’s less of one when you know the story, she found Ezekiel Caleb Smith, born August 9, 1920—Zeke’s great-great-grandfather and namesake, born exactly a century before my nephew. When the twins were born on Ezekiel’s centennial, it seemed only natural to name one of them after him; after that, it was easy to name the other after Ezekiel’s younger brother.
(This is maybe the only part of this story that’s even partly Pete’s fault. If he’d given the nurse each boy’s middle name, Caine and Wayne, instead of just the initials, maybe the clerk wouldn’t have done what she did.)
The clerk saw that date of birth, saw “08/09/2020” entered on the new record, and decided that the new clerk had entered the year incorrectly. She merged Zeke’s admission record into his great-great-grandfather’s record. (I spoke to her a few months ago. She didn’t question the patient being 102 years old; to her, that just made an ER admission unsurprising.)
Similarly, a search for “Woodrow W Smith” pulled up Ezekiel’s kid brother—and this is the real coincidence, because Woodrow Wilson Smith was born September 8th, 1922, exactly 98 years before the incorrect birthdate entered for Woody! The clerk, a bit aggravated at finding two “errors” in this birthdate, merged Woody’s admission into his great-great-great-uncle’s record.
Pete’s exam went fairly quickly. “The ER doctor was nice,” he told me, “but kinda distracted. She didn’t want to hear anything besides ‘car wreck.’ She just checked me over, gave me a scrip for half a dozen hydrocodone, and she was off to the next guy.” But another woman, who Pete said called herself “your case manager,” had questions to make up for the doctor’s lack.
I’ve dealt with hospital staff who’d bend over backward to get patients the best possible care, but this “case manager” seemed to have only two goals: to get Pete out of the ER as quickly as possible, and to make it easy for his health insurance to deny him coverage.
She…
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