Shine OnWoman arrives at hospital for surgery, leaves with surprise baby
Last November Rebecca Oldham, 25, was trying to come to terms with never having any more children.
After a series of tests, doctors told the New Zealand mother-of-one that her severe abdominal pain could only be addressed by the removal of her ovaries.
When she went in for surgery, however, doctors instead discovered a 9-pound baby in her womb. She was 32 weeks pregnant.
They performed a Caesarian section that day.
"I was facing not being able to have any more children because they thought there were problems with my ovaries and all of a sudden we had a son," Oldham tells the New Zealand Herald.
Oldham and her partner, James Tipene, also parents to a little girl named Hayley, called the baby boy James.
"I am so glad they woke me and told me I was going to have another baby," Oldham says. "Even though it was short notice it was better than waking up and being handed a baby."
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Doctors believe the abdominal pain she had been experiencing was caused by James' awkward positioning along her back.
Oldham is now awaiting the findings of an investigation into why her pregnancy was missed despite three ultrasounds, two blood tests and six pregnancy tests.
She says people often ask her how she didn't know she was pregnant.
"I can't explain why but it was scary not knowing," she says.
Auckland obstetrician Dr. Martin Sowter believes the pregnancy should have been detected at some stage of testing. A hospital blood test almost always shows some level of the HCG pregnancy hormone by nine weeks' gestation, and at 32 weeks, an ultrasound should have shown something.
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"If an ultrasound is conducted properly you will always see something. The only way you might miss that is if you were looking at the wrong scan or if the person doing the scan didn't know how to use the equipment properly," Sowter tells the New Zealand Herald.
Oldham isn't the only woman to not know she was pregnant until it was time to give birth. (In fact, there are enough of them for a dedicated TV show!)
According to a 2002 study published in the British Medical Journal, "Deliveries in which the woman has not been aware of her pregnancy until going into labour occur about three times more often than triplets."
And one Serbian study estimates that one out of every 7,225 pregnancies is unknown to the mother until the moment of delivery.
In February of this year, Indiana mother-of-two Mandy Batchelor was rushed to the hospital with mysterious abdominal pain, assumed to be appendicitis. Instead, she gave birth to her third child.
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Batchelor says she experienced very little weight gain, appeared to have periods every month, and had been given a pregnancy test two months before her son's birth by her local doctor — it came back negative.
In 2010, 33-year-old Amanda Burger of Cedar Falls, Iowa, arrived at the hospital suffering from severe stomach cramps. She went home with a newborn daughter. Except for some minor weight gain, she had no symptoms she was expecting.
There are various reasons why a woman might now know she's pregnant: overconfidence in birth control, a false-negative pregnancy test, irregular periods, lack of significant weight gain and other common pregnancy symptoms, and mistaking pregnancy symptoms for another medical condition.
"You can have stress, there can be other things that make you nauseated," says Dr. Eve Espey, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of New Mexico, "and yes, you can have bleeding that comes and goes during the pregnancy that could have coincidentally occurred in a pattern that looks like a period."
Denial is also a big factor, she adds.
"I think there is an incredibly strong power of denial. It's not lying, it’s not being deceitful. But it’s incredibly powerful."
