According to the Houston Chronicle , Amy Woodward-Davis was only a few hours old when her 16 year-old mother discovered she was pregnant and went into labor at the same time. She delivered a baby birl in the bathroom, wrapped it in newspaper, then tossed it out back on a rubbish pile.
Thankfully, the girl's father heard what sounded like kitten cries and went outside to investigate. He discovered the baby in the burning trash, quickly wrapped it in a towel and called the fire department.
By then, tiny Amy had third-and fourth-degree burns over more than half of her body. Her injuries were so severe, doctors did not expect her to survive, but even then she showed the kind of determination that would become a hallmark of her extraordinary life.
Amy survived and was nine months old when she was transferred to the Shriners Burn Hospital in Galveston. She arrived wearing a white cap and sweater over her gauze wrapped body. It was here that she came under the care of a burn technician named Lena Woodward, now 75, who eventually adopted her and helped her through countless hospital visits and more than 200 surgeries.
By the age of five, Amy began to question why her classmates were always teasing her about her burn scars. Woodward and her husband decided to tell Amy, in the simplest possible terms, what happened to her shortly after she was burned. "You used to have a bad mama, and she burned you, now you have a good mama," they told her.
By the age of 21, Amy had enough of surgeries and felt she had reached a point where she could accept the way she looked.
"I'm all right with myself," she told The Chronicle. "At some time in your life you have to be at ease with your mind on how you're going to look, and this is how I'm going to look."
But there was something else she wanted to do - find her biological parents and get some answers.
It was March of 2006 when she found her biological father while searching through some old fire department records. She learned that he was 19 and living in California when she was born in 1971. Surprisingly, he eventually returned to Kansas City and married Amy's mother with whom he had two more children. The family was still living in the same home where Amy had been born.
After she contacted him, he was anxious to hear more about her. Amy told him about her having received both a bachelors and a master's degree, how she was married, now in the process of a divorce, and had a beautiful three year-old daughter.
He wanted to meet her and invited her to come to Kansas City to meet him and the family - including her mother- and she accepted.
When she arrived, her father gave her a tour of the house. The one room she refused to enter was the bathroom, the place where she had been born 41 years earlier.
"I didn't want to face the fact that this is where I was born and nobody took my life seriously," she said. "I was born in this bathroom, and the next thing you know I was burned up."
Her first meeting with her mother was awkward at best. They did little more than exchange pleasantries and sat next to each other for almost an hour barely talking and looking straight ahead at the television.
Because she was too nervous to look directly at her mother, Amy would just steal quick glances of her, enough to notice how similar were their features. For the first time, she saw what she might have looked like without the scars.
Since that first meeting, Amy has asked her mother several times about what happened on the day she was born and why she had been thrown into the trash, but has never received an answer.
She might not have gotten the closure she wanted, but that won't stop her from trying to help the children who she was devoted her life to serving as an adoptions caseworker in Child Protective Services.
"I didn't get the closure, but I would love for the other kids who came behind me to get the closure," she said.
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