This sort of mix-up can happen to anyone who shares a surname or date of birth. However, it is one the defining idiosyncracies of being a twin.
I got a phone call from the hospital on May 16 to pre-register for an outpatient diagnostic procedure thing I have on May 29.
The woman explained the parking situation at the hospital and where to go for patient registration. She confirmed my name and date of birth, my insurance information, my doctor, the date and time of the procedure, and that the procedure had been authorized.
Then she started to get horribly confused.
“Wait,” she said. “This is all screwed up.”
I waited. No one wants to hear that anything involved with their medical records is all screwed up. She did some more typing.
“Huh. Someone must have messed up when they took your information.” She muttered something apologetic.
I wonder how someone could have messed my information up, since I filled out all the paperwork myself. She repeated my name and date of birth. “Is your social security number xxx-xx-xxxx?”
“No.” I chuckled. “That’s my twin’s social security number.”
“Oh.” More typing. She apologized about her slow computer. “Oh, I see. That was Lillith. . . and you’re Eve. You just have the same date of birth, same last name.”
Yeah. Same date of birth, same last name. Funny how that happens with twins. I didn’t say anything, though she might have heard me rolling my eyes.
“So, your social security number is xxx-xx-xxxx?”
“Yes, xxx-xx-xxxx. That one’s mine.”
—
After ensuring that there were no more mix-ups with my registration and hanging up, I related this to Lil. My twin marveled at the idea that she was even in this hospital’s database. She hasn’t been there for well over two decades.
And no, our SSN’s are not really xxx-xx-xxxx.
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