Through most of my childhood I gave my parents little to worry about. But that was not the case in the first five years of my life, beginning with my birth.  At the time of my birth, my parents lived in their hometown of Weirton, West Virginia. In November 1949 Weirton still had no hospital of its own. So when it came time for my birth my dad drove my mother across the Ohio River to a hospital in Steubenville, Ohio. What they expected to be a routine childbirth turned into a complicated procedure that almost killed my mother.  Perhaps, in some ways I didn’t consciously understand until much later in my life, this created a special bond between mother and child.