TLC is premiering a new reality show called Long Lost Family on Sunday, which helps reunite people searching for their biological relatives — which seems like typical enough TLC fare. Such was the case with Jenny Thomas, one woman out of 16 stories featured, who was seeking her biological mother, having learned at age four that she was adopted.
Thomas received the surprise of a lifetime when experts on the show were, in fact, able to track down her mother, and the woman was none other than a former coworker, Nita Valdez. She had worked alongside Valdez for two years as a patient care technician at the Rochester hospital, while Valdez herself was a patient transporter.
While the two women got along well and often shared jokes, their relationship was never anything more than professional, so it goes without saying that Thomas was blindsided at hearing the news.
“I was just in shock,” Thomas tells The Post of first seeing her mother’s photograph. “I had looked in so many faces for so many years, [thinking] ‘Could that be her? Is she looking at me because she knows me?’ All the while I had looked at the woman who once knew me as her daughter. “I didn’t expect that, not in a million years.”
Honestly, stranger things have happened. If Thomas had been put up for adoption in Rochester and grown up there, then the two women continued to live there as adults, it’s not all that unlikely that two women living in the same, small to medium-sized city would cross paths at some point. Good luck to both Thomas and Valdez in their newfound relationship with one another.
(Via New York Post)