EDMONTON – Parents of the first baby to be born at Edmonton’s Grey Nuns Community Hospital had to knock to get in when they arrived at the hospital’s doorstep, they recalled Sunday during celebrations to mark its 25th anniversary.
Kaylee Walters, who was the guest of honour Sunday, was born May 6, 1988.
She was unaware of the hoopla surrounding her arrival, but has read about it many times since in the newspaper articles her parents Lori and Milt kept and had laminated for posterity.
Her parents arrived at the hospital one day after the ribbon-cutting ceremony but a full 30 minutes before it officially opened its doors to patients.
“The door was still locked when we got here,” Lori recalled with a laugh Sunday. “Milt had to knock. When they saw us, they said: ‘Sure, come on in.’”
As the only patient on the maternity ward — and the entire hospital, for that matter — Lori said they had the undivided attention of a host of medical professionals.
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“I don’t know how many there were, but there were a lot of people coming and going. We were treated like royalty.”
Kaylee arrived just hours later, at 4:56 p.m., weighing seven pounds, three ounces. She was a bundle of joy in every sense of the word; two years earlier the couple had been told they would not be able to have children.
“She was more than a gift,” Lori said. “She was a blessing.”
The Walters — including son Mike, born at the Grey Nuns two years after his sister — mingled with current and longtime hospital staff, physicians and Mill Woods residents who gathered under brilliant sunshine for a community barbecue to mark the milestone.
Covenant Health vice-president Karen Macmillan said the event was intended as a thanks for the support the hospital has received from the community through the years. The hospital originally expected to deliver 3,000 babies annually, a number that has doubled. In fact, she says, the Grey Nuns sees more babies born than any other hospital in Edmonton. It also anticipated 25,000 emergency visits each year; last year that number was close to 70,000.
“The Grey Nuns really had humble beginnings as a small hospital in this community,” she says, “and as the community has grown, we’ve grown along with it.”
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