Beaufort Memorial Doctor Reunites With Mom-To-Be He Delivered 28 Years Ago
November 9, 2023Categories: Pregnancy & Childbirth
When three-month-old River Douglas Sanders is old enough to ask his mom about the day he was born, he’s going to get quite the story. In fact, it goes full circle.
River’s life began in 1994 at U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune when a young physician brought River’s mother, Shannan, into the world. Twenty-eight years later, both Shannan and that physician, Dr. Gregory A. Miller, a board-certified OBGYN specialist at Beaufort Memorial Obstetrics and Gynecology Specialists, were stunned to discover that Dr. Miller was going to help deliver her son.
From the moment Shannan met Dr. Miller, she says they had an instant connection.
New patients at Beaufort Memorial Obstetrics & Gynecology Specialists routinely rotate through the practice’s roster of physicians in the early months of pregnancy in order to help them find the best patient-physician match, and Dr. Miller was the last on Shannan’s rotation.
“I liked all the doctors I saw, but after my first appointment with Dr. Miller, I just knew he was the one for me,” Shannan remembers. “I really can’t explain it. There was just a really good vibe.”
Dr. Miller thought so, too.
“Sometimes you connect with a patient beyond the typical patient-physician relationship, and it becomes more of a friendship,” he says. “That’s what happened with Shannan.”
The decision was made; they were officially a team.
Read More: OBGYNs vs. Gynecologists
Two Generations, One Doctor
During her next checkup, a medical assistant asked Shannan where she was from.
“I laughed and said, ‘All over the world, but I was born at Camp Lejeune,’” she recalled. “Dr. Miller stopped in his tracks and asked me what year. He said he delivered babies at Camp Lejeune from 1993 to 1996. I told him I was born in 1994 and we just started to joke that maybe he had delivered me. We both said, ‘Wouldn’t that be crazy?’”
The thought stayed with Shannan and when she got home from her checkup, she called her mom and asked if she remembered the name of the doctor who delivered her. Her mom couldn’t recall the doctor’s name.
“She just remembered that he was young and that he was funny,” Shannan says. “I guess it was a long labor, and when she finally pushed me out, she said to the doctor, ‘That’s it. I’m done.’ He laughed and said, ‘You are not done.’”
Turns out, neither was he.
Dr. Miller, a Navy veteran, left Camp Lejeune in 1996 to join a private practice in Rock Hill. Twenty years later he arrived in Beaufort with his family to help launch the OBGYN practice at Beaufort Memorial.
Meanwhile, Shannan was on the move as well. Less than a year after she was born, her family moved to Wisconsin, and they kept on moving. She attended kindergarten in Japan and grade school in Hawaii. When her father retired from the military he moved first to Florida and then to Beaufort where Shannan attended high school and USCB, earning a Bachelor of Arts in human services in 2017.
Shannan, a preschool teacher, met her husband, Ethan, not long after. They married in 2021 and were eager to give Ethan’s daughter a sibling. And the rest was history in the making.
After her appointment, Shannan couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility that the doctor who brought her into the world was going to bring her son into the world, too. Her dad made a few calls about medical records but was told it could take months to locate them.
“Which I didn’t have,” Shannan laughs. “I wanted to know now.”
Her dad made a few calls about medical records. It turned out that while her birth certificate didn’t provide an answer, her mother’s application for it did. As Shannan scanned a stack of documents at home, she found the birth certificate application. Her eyes were drawn to the bottom of the page and the delivering physician’s name: Dr. Gregory A. Miller.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Shannan remembers. “I had goosebumps and a few tears.”
Wanting to present the proof in person, Shannan waited until her next appointment to show the document to Dr. Miller. “He just looked at it and smiled and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
“It was very cool and exciting to see the circle of life being completed,” Dr. Miller says.
Read More: Out of the White Coat: Dr. Tiffany Bersani
‘10/10’ Experience
Shannan was scheduled to be induced on Sept. 6, a week after Dr. Miller was to return from a family vacation in Scotland. But River had other plans.
“At 2:00 in the morning on the very day that Dr. Miller was supposed to leave for Scotland, my water broke,” Shannan explains. “I was excited to meet River, but also a little heartbroken that Dr. Miller wasn’t going to deliver him. I waited until office hours the next morning to see if maybe he’d missed his flight. ‘Okay, this is happening,’ I told myself. ‘You can’t wait for Dr. Miller.’”
River was delivered on Aug. 29 by Dr. Christopher Benson, also a former military physician. Longtime friends and partners at the Rock Hill practice prior to moving to the Lowcountry, Dr. Benson joined Dr. Miller at Beaufort Memorial Obstetrics & Gynecology Specialists when the hospital opened the practice in 2014.
“It couldn’t have gone any better,” Shannan says. “Dr. Benson was amazing, the staff members at Beaufort Memorial were amazing and the nurses were amazing. It was a 10 out of 10 experience, even though history didn’t exactly repeat itself.”
Read More: Collins Birthing Center: A Better Birth Experience
The Start of a New Chapter
When he returned from vacation and discovered that Shannan had gone into labor a week early, Dr. Miller was disappointed, too.
“I checked the hospital delivery log and saw River was here,” Dr. Miller says. “I was sorry to have missed it, but I was happy Dr. Benson was the one who delivered him, and I was thrilled when I got to meet him. It is so nice to see the beginning of the next chapter in someone’s life. It’s always an honor to participate in the beginning of that chapter.”
Shannan hasn’t given up the hope that history will repeat itself one day.
“There’s still a next time,” she says. “Dr. Miller has to deliver one of my kids. I mean, what are the odds that we would both wind up here in Beaufort all these years later? I think it’s meant to be.”
If you are planning a family and looking for an OBGYN, request an appointment with a Beaufort Memorial provider.