109 – You Can’t Change The Past
109 – You Can’t Change The Past  
Podcast: Who Am I Really?
Published On: Sat Feb 01 2025
Description: Dan has barely told anyone the his whole story until this episode. He shared that he was in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) as an infant. Then his son's rare medical condition and his wife’s ability to share her heredity while he could not was a catalyst for his search. Dan is thankful for the warm welcome he’s received in his paternal family, and is still hoping that his birthmother will come around to wanting to know him. This is Dan's Journey.Dan (00:04):I kind of find it ironic that now that I found my birth father, that my birth parents had passed away. So it's like, I hear a lot of people when you try to read to your birth parents, it's like your chapter one in the beginning. You don't know that. But now that I met them, I'm getting more about my beginning, but I don't have my parents to give me chapters one and two, you know, when you're real young and you don't remember everything,Damon (00:30):Who am I? Who am I?Damon (00:35):Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? This is who am I really a podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members. I'm Damon Davis and on today's show is Daniel. He called me from Nicholasville, Kentucky. Dan has barely told anyone his whole story until this episode, he shared that his son's rare medical condition and his wife's ability to share her heredity while he could not was a catalyst for his search. Dan is thankful for the warm welcome he's received in his paternal family and is still hoping that his birth mother will come around to wanting to know him. This is Dan's journey. Daniel was born in January of 1980, adopted four months later after he spent that period of time in the neonatal intensive care unit, the NICU.Dan (01:34):So I was born six weeks premature, and I had some brain and lung issues. So I was in the NICU for the first four months of life. The doctor didn't think I would live to two may never walk and could be blind.Damon (01:48):Dan's adoptive parents had a variety of personal setbacks that prevented them from getting pregnant. But four years after Dan was born, his little brother who is biological to their parents was conceived. They grew up out in the country, outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, and the brothers got along just fine. Their father's side of the family lived nearby. So all of the kids just ran up and down from house to house, taking advantage of being outdoors.Dan (02:15):Two of my uncles live within a mile of me, so we could walk. I could walk house to house and run around and displaying the neighborhood.Damon (02:22):That's incredible. That's some of the best growing up, man, when you can just go between house to house, safe and sound. No worries.Dan (02:31):Go run around to the woods in the neighborhood and play, stick guns and just run around. And so, yeah,Damon (02:37):I love that. That's really amazing. Yeah. Dan said he never felt out of place in his family. He said he always knew he was adopted. And his adopted mother used to talk about his birth mother calling her by name. Dan said, he'd share more about that later. In his fourth grade health class, Dan learned what adoption truly meant. I asked him how felt when he learned the meaning of adoption at that age,Dan (03:03):I kind of cut kind of quiet about it. And what was interesting in my house, my mother was adopted around the age of eight. She was adopted, but learning later on when I became in my twenties and thirties, learning about her adoption, it's much different and darker in contrast to my own story. So I never really talked to her about it at all. Despite the commonality that we have. So, um, once I found out, I remember feeling kind of confused about why I was adopted and even though you're adopted and my family was great. It's still kind of like you fit in. You know, even though you fit in with your family, you still know there's something else. It's kind of different. If that makes sense.Damon (03:41):Dan kept quiet about adoption growing up, going on to graduate high school, attend the university of Kentucky for college, then earned his PhD in biomedical engineering. It was in grad school where he met his wife and they eventually had a son together the whole time Dan's own adoption. Never really came up as a topic of discussion.Dan (04:02):All honesty. No, I kept it to myself. I think I told my wife while we were dating. And then I really didn't bring it up hardly at all with anybody, I guess I didn't know how to talk about, so I wasn't sure how to process it. So I just never talked about it. So for me to come on this podcast to talk to you is kind of a big step.Damon (04:22):Wow. Well, thanks for doing it, man. You're going to, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how you feel at the other end, after having delved into everything. And then I'm sure you're going to help somebody else by sharing your own story too.Dan (04:34):That's a part of the reason I agreed to do it. Cause I contact you and I'll talk about it here a little bit later when we get into the search of how I found the podcast while I was searching.Damon (04:43):Interesting. Well, that's exactly what I was going to getting ready to turn to then is you sound like you found out what adoption truly meant when you were maybe eight years old. Fourth grade? Yeah. About eight or nine. Yeah. You kept it in the back of your mind. Never really talked about it at all. You revealed it to your wife when you, before you got married when you started dating, but that was it. So what was the catalyst for you to even begin a search? Because it sounds like you pushed it down and didn't really have any interest in, in looking. What was, what, what sparked your interest? All of a suddenDan (05:17):The first one started in 2010 when my father passed away. So I started thinking, what if it's too late? I don't want to hear a second hand about my biological parents. I'd like to be able to at least meet them or talk to them hopefully and see if the name that I had initially for my birth mother was correct.Damon (<a href="https://www.temi.com/editor/t/X15fKgRhj8jgGSi_RxApPs02IoQWYgeGj887drs2_oax2uc9nUmnsTJC53R7daubSeWZWdtuJG0cifqTzqit_Uhqg7k?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=335.91" rel="noopener noreferrer"...