Man switched at birth renews calls for N.L. government to apologize [Video]

It took Clarence Hynes five years to order a DNA test, which would prove the inevitable fact he didn’t want to confront.

His family was not his biological family. His childhood experiences should have belonged to someone else.

Hynes discovered in 2013 that he was likely switched at birth at a cottage hospital in Come By Chance, N.L., 51 years earlier. In 2018, he confirmed it with a test.

“In ’13 I didn’t want to accept it,” he said in an interview with CBC this week. “I couldn’t get my head around it. It was just devastating. I was just — couldn’t even deal with it. At that time I went into a depression, struggled with it for a couple years.”

Hynes and the other man who had been switched at birth, Craig Avery, have filed a lawsuit against the health authority responsible for the hospital, which closed in 1986. …