Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
The boys are good friends, even if they are pretty opposite personalities.
They make lots of noise and bang into things as they play a spirited game of pool in the living room.
“I’m down to the eight-ball!” Kalib yells as he banks in a nifty shot, leaning across the table.
Adam snorts.
Adam Miller is of heavier build, more serious – a lover of all things dinosaur. Kalib Gill is smaller, quick, athletic, always ready with a comeback.
When they celebrate their birthdays this week, Kalib on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 22, and Adam on Friday, Nov. 23, they’ll have been nephew and uncle, respectively, for 10 years.
As Laurie Singer remembers it now, she had a foreboding back in early in 1997.
Singer was 38 at the time and she was newly remarried. She also was newly pregnant, with Adam.
She was a little worried – it had been 17 years since her last children, twins Mandy and Tiffany, had been born. She asked her doctor, Alan Blake, about it and he checked her out and told her everything looked fine.
But she was still concerned.
“I had an intuition,” she said. “I gathered my three daughters around and asked them if any of them were pregnant.”
They all said they weren’t, but as it turned out, Mandy was wrong.
“I didn’t know,” said Mandy Gill. About two weeks later she found out she was pregnant with Kalib.
“I thought, ‘Oops,'” she said. “I cried when I first found out. We didn’t say anything to (her mother). We took it by ourselves. Then we told my mother, then my dad.”
“It wasn’t the best circumstances,” Singer said.
Mandy and her boyfriend, Randy Gill, had been going together since she was a freshman and he was a sophomore. Randy was now taking criminal justice classes at Linn-Benton Community College and Mandy, a junior at Sweet Home High School, was a lifeguard at the pool.
“Dr. Blake took care of us,” Singer said. “That was the really good part. (Mandy) nagged me all the time because of my age, my fibromyalgia and because I smoked at the time.”
As it turned out, both of their pregnancies advanced normally until Mandy developed some problems in the final month.
Singer said she and Blake had thought she was due later, but Blake rechecked their calculations on Nov. 18 and realized that she really was three days overdue.
“He said, ‘We’ve got to get you in. You’re overdue,'” Singer said.
Mandy stopped in the next day to see how her mother was doing and Blake noticed something wasn’t right.
She had preeclampsia, a dangerous condition that can cause fetal complications. The doctor admitted her immediately.
Mandy says she was retaining 50 to 60 pounds of water, but Kalib’s delivery, at 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 22, went fine. Adam was born the next morning, Saturday, at 7:30 a.m.
Randy Gill said the hospital put the two in its only double room.
“It was the first time they’d had a mother and daughter in there together,” he said.
His mother-in-law said the hospital “was really good to us.”
So was Randy, who was barely 18, she said.
“Randy helped take care of me as well as Mandy,” she said. “When they put us in the mother-daughter room, he finally got to sleep for the first time in about three days.”
Blake, thinking all was well, decided to leave for a pre-planned trip on Sunday evening.
“He thought Mandy was fine,” Singer said. It turned out she wasn’t. Both her mother and the nurses were bothered by how she looked. She had been swelling for three days.
By Tuesday she was in the intensive care unit at Lebanon and on Wednesday she was Life-Flight-ed to Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, suffering from postpartum cardiomyopathy, a very rare condition caused when a mother’s heart is weakened during the birthing process and other organs, such as the lungs and liver, begin shutting down.
“That was bad,” said Singer. “We had two new babies and Mandy was going the other way.”
One nurse from LCH volunteered to take the babies to make sure they got proper care during the crisis, and others called daily to check on Mandy’s progress, she said.
“They didn’t need to, but I just think they went above and beyond the call of duty,” Singer said.
Randy’s mother was able to take Kalib and the rest of them spent Thanksgiving at Sacred Heart. Mandy improved and was able to go home after two weeks.
Singer and Adam’s father had separated, and so the three parents teamed up to take care of the new family members. Mandy went back to school, determined to finish high school, and Randy went back to LBCC, where he decided to focus on getting an emergency medical technician certificate.
“The teachers were actually helpful,” Mandy said. “I ended up taking a class to catch up.”
Randy rotated with Laurie during the day and took classes in the evenings, when Mandy was home from school. Their rotation also included Mandy’s twin, Tiffany.
Singer said her ex-husband helped them financially, which allowed her to stay home and help her daughters finish school.
Randy worked as a volunteer firefighter and at Santiam Supply when he read in The New Era that the Sweet Home Police Department was seeking candidates for a police officer position. He applied and was selected out of 35 candidates in 2004.
Though the Gills eventually moved down the street, they’ve always been close. They’ve grown up together since Day One, Singer said.
“They’ve grown up together and the only year they were not together (in school) was first grade,” she said. “We see them fight like cats and dogs because they are so close, but their teachers tell us they get along well.”
Typical 10-year-olds, the boys are a little reluctant to acknowledge that they like being together.
“We’ve known each other since way back,” Kalib said. “We’ve been together about 10 years.”
“He kicked me in the face when I was a day old,” Adam said, as his older relatives tried to shush him up. “That’s what my mom told me.”
Adam loves to fish and said one of his favorite experiences was when he caught striped bass on a trip to Arizona. He also likes reading, the afore-mentioned dinosaurs, and “paleontology.” He’s particularly interested right now in bearded dragons.
“I want to get a baby and raise it myself,” he said.
Kalib, on the other hand, loves baseball and football and playing pool.
“I think we’re raising a pool shark,” his dad said as Kalib put another ball in the pocket.
Kalib said his football team took third place in the league after tying a tough opponent in their last game.
He said he also collects rocks and he likes to swim.
“I love to play the guitar,” he added, before grabbing a pool cue and embarking on a mock jam session.
Most of their birthday parties thus far have been combined but this year the boys are planning separate celebrations, each on his own day.
Debbie Aman, a teacher at Oak Heights School, had both boys in her class for second and third grade.
She said they both work hard in school and were well-behaved – although she did recall one little tussle on the playground. She said each has his own social circle, though the two do overlap.
“If you walked into my classroom, you wouldn’t have known that they were uncle and nephew, or that they were related,” Aman said. “They each have their own personality and their own style. They just go about their business.”
Looking back, Singer is just glad things have turned out as well as they have.
“It was tough,” she said of the events that surrounded the boys’ births. “But it worked out.
“This is a family story,” Singer said. “It’s about how a family pulls together. Mandy getting sick wasn’t my ideal thing. But I still believe that a strong family can accomplish just about anything.”