Sarah Currin beams like any other proud new mum. But this new mum didn’t realise she was pregnant until she was in labour.
Sarah delivered a healthy baby girl at 37 weeks on May 1, after being rushed to hospital with suspected appendicitis.
The 25-year-old said she woke up in the morning feeling “a little bit off”, but decided to go to work.
It wasn’t until about 11ish where I started getting really bad stomach pains but I forced myself to work,” she said.
“It got to about one o’clock and I thought no, I have to go home.”
She had such severe stomach cramps that she called an ambulance and was taken to hospital at 2.30pm with the baby born just two hours later.
We called the ambulance and I said ‘I think I have appendicitis’ and they weren’t sure either. I definitely didn’t think I was pregnant!”
Ms Currin said her doctor told her she probably had a stomach bug.
“It wasn’t until the midwives were like ‘no, feel here’, and said I was fully dilated,” that it became apparent.
They started telling me to push, and I said ‘push what? What are you talking about? I was quite shocked and very scared because I didn’t know what was going on.”
Obstetrician Dr Paul Bretz, from Arrivals Obstetricians at Woolloongabba, said the situation was uncommon, but not unheard of.
Over 20 years of doing obstetrics, I’ve probably seen three or four cases where this has happened,” he said.
Dr Bretz said he was aware of other cases where a woman in her 40s attributed an absence of periods to menopause, or a woman falling pregnant soon after giving birth and attributing a lack of periods to breast feeding.
It’s often a misinterpretation of the symptoms. “If you’re not expecting something, or not wanting to be in that situation, then the signs can be incorrectly attributed to something else.”
Ms Currin said she did not notice any symptoms of pregnancy. “I put on the slightest bit of weight, but nothing drastic that would make me think (I was pregnant),” she said. “You just never expect it to happen to you, it’s one of those things you read in the paper.”
Ms Currin said she and her partner James now could not imagine life without little Brooke. “She’s so adorable,” she said. “(James) has been really, really good. “He’s just taken to fatherhood really, really well.”
Dr Bretz said 2.7 kilograms was a normal weight for a baby, but on the lower end of the normal range, so “that would have meant the baby was more easily hidden”.
1 Comment
I know of more than woman who has had her periods all the way through her pregnancies and has two healthy boys. I know another lady who went months without periods due to a thyroid problem. She only got suspicious when she felt off colour for a few days and thought it was a virus as there was some going around at the time, then felt very tired. She had a tendency for low iron levels and thought that it was from that. Imagine the shock when at 13 weeks she found out she was pregnant.