By NY Post
NY POST – Jenny Thomas has known she was adopted since the age of 4. With very little information known about her birth mother (besides that she was from Rochester, NY, where Thomas, 40, still lives), she would find herself peering into women’s faces, wondering if any could be her mom.
After spending more than 15 years intermittently trying to track her down on the Internet, it wasn’t until Thomas signed up for the new TLC reality show “Long Lost Family” that she learned the truth: She had not only seen her birth mother before, but worked alongside her for two years.
“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.”
The two women met 10 years ago, when Thomas was working as a part-time patient care technician at a Rochester hospital, and her mother, Nita Valdez, was a patient transporter. They interacted on a regular basis to move patients from their rooms to rehabilitation therapy, and while Thomas says they worked well together, she never noticed a physical or emotional connection.
