What was going on when I was born?

President Reagan's doctors announced today that he would probably leave the hospital for the White House tomorrow but that he probably would not have the stamina to return to work in the Oval Office for another week. A potential complication could cause the President to defer his return home until Sunday, but Dr. Dennis S. O'Leary, medical spokesman for George Washington University Hospital, said he would be ''amazed'' if it did. The potential difficulty arises from the appearance in Mr. Reagan's chest X-ray of ''a tiny little pocket'' of air, a half-inch in diameter, in the left lung, which Dr. O'Leary said suggested the possibility of an abscess, or walled off area of infection. Dr. O'Leary said, however, that the doctors continued to believe the President had no infection because his temperature and white blood cell count were both normal. Decision Based on X-rays Dr. O'Leary said the pocket was being watched to see if it became larger and began collecting fluid that would normally be secreted from the bronchial tubes and then coughed up. If the X-rays tomorrow show that the pocket is preventing Mr. Reagan's lung from draining the fluids effectively, he might stay in the hospital another day, Dr. O'Leary said.

Governor Carey announced an agreement today with four county executives on a revised program to have the state assume local Medicaid costs over the next seven years. The revised proposal was part of Mr. Carey's campaign to win support for his Medicaid plan, which has been opposed by the leader of the Senate's Republican majority, Warren M. Anderson of Binghamton, and has been called the major obstacle to approval of the state budget. The Governor announced that he had invited all the legislative leaders to his office for a meeting on Sunday. But by the end of the day, the deadlock that has left the state without a budget and unable to pay its bills the last 10 days appeared no closer to a resolution.

The conflict between ideological purists and those who bear the responsibility for moving legislation through Congress was demonstrated anew last night when three Republican Senators helped to sidetrack an austere budget proposed by a Republican President. In the Senators' view, the budget was not conservative enough. Each of them had campaigned for a balanced budget, and they said they had voted against the proposal in the Senate Budget Committee because the committee's own economic projections were that the budget would not be balanced by 1984. The vote that defeated the President's proposal, as readjusted by the committee, was 12 to 8 with nine Democrats and the three Republicans opposing the proposal.

Acting after Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski threatened to resign if it did not move to prevent new strikes, the Polish Parliament approved a resolution tonight for a two-month suspension of strikes and threats to strike. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor, with only four abstentions among the 440 members. It came shortly before midnight after almost 14 hours of debate. Before the vote, leaders of the independent union Solidarity, meeting in Gdansk, issued a statement expressing ''deep anxiety'' over the Prime Minister's virtual ultimatum. The statement said that the way to avert strikes was ''by eliminating the causes through upholding the law and fulfilling the agreements.''

A mysterious computer breakdown caused postponement of the launching of the space shuttle Columbia today, and space agency officials pressed to reschedule it for Sunday morning. The earliest the orbital test mission could get under way is 6:50 A.M. Sunday. But until the computer problem in the spaceship could be corrected the officials were unable to say when the re-usable winged Columbia would be cleared for another launching attempt. Tonight engineers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston identified the source of the malfunction as a timing fault in one set of spaceship computers that disrupted communications with the backup computer.

The space agency said tonight that it had identified the problem that had caused the computers aboard the space shuttle Columbia to refuse to ''talk to each other'' properly this morning. The computers balked just before the Columbia's scheduled launching, causing at least a two-day postponement of the spaceship's shakedown cruise. Although they said they understood the problem, the engineers were still unable to remedy it. Analysts for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent the day poring over long pages of printouts in back buildings of the Johnson Space Center here and at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where the space shuttle was to be launched. Problem 'Never Seen Before' The chief engineers said that the computer problem had never occurred in all the thousands of hours of flight simulations and tests that the spaceship and its computers had been through.

In a stunning blow to the Protestant establishment in Northern Ireland, Robert Sands, an imprisoned member of the Irish Republican Army, has been elected to the British Parliament. The 27-year-old prisoner is serving a 14-year sentence for firearms violations and is nearing the end of the sixth week of a hunger strike as well. Mr. Sands, who is called Bobby, was declared the winner today in yesterday's by-election in a constituency in the southwest corner of the province, along the border with Ireland. He defeated Harold West, a 63-year-old Protestant Unionist.

The programs under the seven-year-old Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, like well-traveled suitcases, have acquired quite a collection of scratches, baggage tickets and unsightly bulges. They have been battered by scandals and abuses and jolted as the political and ideological course of the act has been shifted from destination to destination. They have been crammed, emptied and crammed again at a cost of $51 billion since the legislation setting up CETA, as it is widely known, was signed in July 1974. Nearly $10 billion of this money paid for traditional vocational training programs but the bulk of the money, $41 billion, has been spent to create federally subsidized jobs for the unemployed and disadvantaged in programs that grew in wild spurts. It is this public service aspect of programs created under the act that has led to scandal and abuse, mostly by municipal governments using CETA funds to pay their regular workers. It is the public service aspect that the Reagan Administration proposes to cut back this year by $153 million and to eliminate entirely in 1982 by withdrawing $3.1 billion that had been proposed for it by President Carter. The act is administered by the Department of Labor.

A grenade injured two people in a major store in the capital's commercial area today, witnesses and a guerrilla group reported.

A series of student demonstrations set off by a good-will visit of two United States naval vessels and fueled by labor strife and charges of police brutality ended this week with four dead, dozens injured and several hundred arrested. Before calm was restored Tuesday night, two students, a journalist and a newspaper deliverer had been shot dead by the police. The shootings shocked Dominicans of all political persuasions, and the anger lingers like the charred remains of the tires and garbage burned in the city's intersections. ''We have an epidemic of barbarity,'' charged Silvio Herasme Pena, publisher of the newspaper La Noticia, whose reporter, Marcelino Vega, 23 years old, was shot dead by the police while reporting on the violence Tuesday morning.

Violence in Lebanon increased today as Syrian and Lebanese Christian artillerymen exchanged intense fire around the eastern town of Zahle and Israel staged an air and ground attack on Palestinian guerrilla positions in the south. In Beirut there was sporadic shooting between Syrian soldiers of the Arab deterrent force and Lebanese Christian militiamen despite the latest cease-fire, the 18th ordered by President Elias Sarkis since the current crisis began April 2. Palestinian sources said that 14 Palestinians and residents of such southern communities as Dalhamiya and Arab Salim were killed in the Israeli attack and that 25 were wounded. Israel's military command said one Israeli soldier was killed and one wounded in the raid, which began late last night and carried across the Zaharani River 10 miles into Lebanese territory.

Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. and Lord Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, disagreed today on the priorities that should be given efforts to seek both peace and security in the Middle East, British and American officials said. Lord Carrington, who is pressing for a European initiative in the Middle East to resolve the stalemate that has existed for the last two years, wants to bring the Palestine Liberation Organization into peace efforts as soon as possible. He believes that until there is a peace agreement involving Israel and all the Arab nations, including resolution of the Palestinian question, there will be continual instability in the area, inviting Soviet inroads, British officials said. Mr. Haig, who arrived here after a trip to the Middle East, stressed in their discussions today the need for building a strategic consensus in the region against a Soviet threat. He argued, American officials said, that if the countries in the area felt secure against external interference, this would assist the peace efforts.