Childbirth? Nothing To It....

"Deliveries in which the woman has not been aware of her pregnancy until going into labour occur about three times more often than triplets."
2002 paper in the British Medical Journal

"Mitch was running around the house, screaming, hyperventilating, but now we've pretty much come to terms that we've been thrust into parenthood and honestly, this baby makes it very easy for us to love him.
"It's been shocking, but now we're starting to get into the groove of things."
Kendra Reid, new Ottawa mother

Facebook    Kendra Reid, holding her new — and completely unexpected — baby boy. “It’s actually a lot easier to have happen to you than you’d think.” 

 

Women most certainly know when they're pregnant. There are all the classic symptoms of pregnancy as certain hormones kick in with a pregnancy onset, and bedevil the mother-to-be with all manner of awkward and often miserable conditions related to pregnancy. On the other hand, there are those well-publicized incidents of women 'not knowing' they are pregnant. And of course we know that these are women who are grossly obese, and the pregnancy is more or less hidden.

Right? Oh, so wrong. That appears to be a rather popular social misconception; obesity, in medical literature seems to have no relationship to a sudden 'unaware' birth, although it can happen that a morbidly obese woman is ignorant of her state until the baby comes to term and birth is imminent. But that kind of surprise is more typical, it would appear, among young and fit women whose physical condition is not betrayed by weight gain.

Hard to believe, but 24-year-old Ottawan Kendra Reid can attest to the truth of that. She had gained a few extra pounds, it would appear, but nothing unusual; there was no need for special clothing to accommodate a wider waist and a blooming belly. She had no spontaneous events of nausea and vomiting, nothing to warn this young woman that she was carrying a pregnancy.

And then, on Monday night, sleepless, she left the bed where her partner was fast asleep, to go to the bathroom, experiencing sudden abdomen cramps. Sitting on the toilet she suddenly shrieked. That woke Mitch Stone, the new father, who rushed into the bathroom in time to see the mother of their unexpected child "pulling my baby boy out of the toilet".

The baby weighed in at over eight pounds. An ambulance was called. A paramedic carried the new baby, blanket-wrapped, out to the ambulance. And Kendra Reid was strapped into a gurney, loaded into the ambulance beside her baby, and transported to Ottawa Hospital. The condition which doctors call "denied pregnancy", is evidently not entirely unknown to paramedics.

Facebook    A paramedic carries Kendra Reid's and Mitch Stone's new baby through their living room.

 

In the literature of other such events a 17-year-old dancer in Britain gave birth to an eight-pound baby. "She wasn't ill and looked just as slim all the way through", her mother was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail. And only two months earlier than that a 33-year-old Minnesota mother of three, training for a half-marathon, was put out of commission by excruciating back pain. Checking into a hospital emergency room, doctors soon calmly delivered her fourth child.

According to the overjoyed father, his fiancee "didn't show at all. Everyone that saw her was ... in shock that she had a baby". As for the ecstatic new mother: "The shock has worn off quite a bit actually, we were in extreme shock the other day."

Congratulations to you both.