So I'm cruising Facebook and I stumble on this story about a woman who went to the hospital thinking she had a hernia and wound up with a 10-pound baby boy.
Huh? I thought. How does that happen?
So I followed the link to the story on abcnews.go.com. I read about Linda Ackley, 44, who had been told she couldn't have children. She'd also had surgery that removed some of her stomach muscles.
Somehow she missed the fact that she was pregnant and was surprised when a CT scan revealed the news. The baby, a healthy girl, was delivered by emergency c-section.
Her husband got the news over the phone. Needless to say, he was surprised. "I wish someone would have taken a picture of my face."
I thought about this story for a few days and decided it was worth a column. Since I couldn't find the story on Facebook again I did a Google search for "woman who didn't know she was pregnant." And got an education.
According to Google, there were about 158,000,000 results for the search. Even if you figure half of these are bogus results, that's a lot of stories.
Not having time to read all of these, I tried to skim a few. The upshot is these women claim that there was no sign that they were pregnant. They say that they had their periods, no cravings, and didn't put weight gain down to pregnancy. Some of these women also didn't gain much weight during this time, which I admit makes me jealous.
There's even a television show on TLC called "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant" that features these stories. According to the website health.howstuffworks.com (which appears to be associated with the Discovery channel) one researcher estimated that 1 in 475 births 20 weeks along or more were the result of a "denied pregnancy."
I've been pregnant twice in my life. Both times I didn't have to wonder about it. John and James made their existences in my body very apparent. Now with John I was expecting it. James I wasn't, but it didn't take me long to figure out what was going on.
So part of me looks at these women and asks, "how could you not know? There were no signs? No morning sickness? Cravings? Weight gain? Movement?"
Apparently, some women go through pregnancy experiencing a minimum of these symptoms. Or if they had them, they put them down to other things, such as stress or another medical condition.
But surely a doctor would've been able to tell? If they went to the doctor the pregnancy would've been discovered, right?
According to an OB-GYN quoted in the abcnews article, maybe not. Dr. Kimberly Gecsi claimed that she'd had patients sent to her by family practitioners who were convinced the patient had cancer. This makes you wonder about some doctors.
This same doctor says that the cases of denied pregnancies she sees in her practice are mostly young women in denial. This to me seems to be the case a lot of times - a woman thinks she can't be pregnant and so dismisses the signs.
It seems to me that in today's world, with the level of medical technology and information available, women should be able to know they are pregnant before the baby decides to be born. Not knowing might be a perfect storm of medical circumstances - or maybe the woman just doesn't want to admit the possibility.
Know your bodies, ladies. If you are of childbearing age and your body suddenly goes weird on you, don't discount the possibility of a new arrival. If you're my age (and lack certain female equipment) then sorry, our weight gain can't be blamed on a baby. Time to start exercising.
Sunday, February 24, 2013 - www.newssun.com/col-022413-ware