A Tampa, Florida woman didn’t know she was pregnant until her third trimester. The baby was a record weight for the hospital: 14.1 lbs.
People are skeptical whenever they hear that a woman didn’t know she was carrying a child. There are TV reality shows about it but not a lot of sympathy for the woman. Well I can tell you that it’s possible because of a girl – she was a girl then – that I went to high school with.
Let’s call her C. She was slim but suddenly found she had trouble buttoning her jeans. She also noticed her feet were swelling. Otherwise, things were pretty normal. She even got a light period every month. One day she began getting horrible cramps and thought she was dying. Doctors in the ER delivered her surprise son.
C wasn’t a dummy. She wasn’t cognitively impaired or from the sticks or anything like that. She was a naive teen and never considered pregnancy as a cause for her slight weight gain. But she’s proof that it can happen.
The baby in Florida, who looks more like a toddler, is the third for the woman and her husband. There’s no truth to the rumour that he chewed off his own umbilical cord.
Many years ago, I worked with a woman who was quite large. She went to the hospital with extreme cramps and the cramps turned out to be a baby boy. Mary & her son still live in the area and I see them every summer when I buy vegetables at their produce stand.
It would be interesting to conduct a study examining the overall health of those children born to woman who didn’t know they were pregnant and just went about life and those who did and took various steps and precautions to have a healthy baby.