my girlfriend was pregnant a about a week from her due date and we wanted it to come early so we were told that sex would speed it up and we did it on april 2 and then within thirty minutes she started having contractions. Well, it turns out that the baby was born the next day at 10:45 and was placed into the hands of the great adoptive parents arms two days later. My girlfriend went for a doctor visit on the 20th of april (17 days later) and the doctor took a sonogram and said that she has another fertilized egg in her uterus. We haven’t touched sex at all between then and now. Given that she didin’t have sex with anyone else how is this possible?
Ideas:
semen staying alive for long periods of time
menstrating during end of pregnancy
supernatural phenomenom
My source was a coworker who had a friend who supposedly got pregnant (2nd womb) two months after getting pregnant (1st womb), and it was a problem. Now this is real third-hand information, but I know medical people and have confirmed that this is possible–but rare. (The friend of the coworker was on her third child, so it was apparently an easy thing not to discover.)
Why did the doctor take a sonogram of a women who had just given birth? If he wanted to find out if she was pregnant, wouldn’t he use a regular urine or blood test?
I don’t think you can even see anything in a sonogram at the two-week point. This site says the embryo (note: not the “fertilized egg”, which would be much too small to see anyway) is visible on ultrasound at about week six.
I’m not a doctor or ultrasound tech, but the story doesn’t make much sense to me.
There’s something in small mammals (maybe others, but I only know it from having bred gerbils) called post-partumn heat, where the female is sexually receptive (often very) for a few hours after giving birth; the male often sits, waiting to leap on her the moment the birth is finished. If she isn’t impregnated at that point, she will not usually be on heat again until the litter is almost weaned. YRMMV
They could have been doing an ultrasound to see how she was healing, to check if there were remnants of the placenta left, or something like that, and just noticed something unusual…maybe?
I agree, I have a hard time believing that you could see a 17-day-old fertilized egg with a sonogram…
I have a related story though. A guy I knew -his wife had twins (from one uterus) but they weren’t concieved at the same time; they were concieved several weeks apart. I had never heard of that, but he said that his doctor could tell the fetuses were of different ages.
Now how would that happen? If one embryo had already implanted, wouldn’t the resulting hormones prevent another egg from being released? So where did the second egg come from?
Under the best conditions, sperm can only last for five days before fertilization. Even with two uterii, the hormone balance would be out of whack. The estrogen levels would be too low, progesterone too high, and oxytocin’s going to cause implantation to be impossible. Besides, during labor, everything - baby, fluid, placenta and any lining is flushed out of the uterus, and the uterine lining continues to come out for at least a week afterwards - a zygote would not survive that process long enough for a lining to rebuild and make a bed to implant.
On top of all that, there’s a plug of mucus that stoppers up the opening to the uterus, making it unlikely that sperm could even enter. If they did, there’s a baby, an amniotic sac full of fluid and a placenta, all forming barriers to put a diaphragm to shame.
She could have gotten pregnant a couple of weeks after the birth, though. The ultrasound, at this point, should be able to pinpoint the very day of conception pretty accurately. If she won’t tell you, she’s probably hiding something.
I’d ask for a DNA test, because if you didn’t have sex with her after the 2nd, it’s highly, highly unlikely that it’s your baby. Unlikely enough that the doctor will be writing it up for publishing in some journal or another.
Yes, it should prevent another egg from being released, and eggs are only “good” for 24-48 hours. There could be a difference of maybe 4 days, but that’s it. “Several weeks” sounds like proud papa hyperbole.
(I suppose the unofficial term is “hoing around.”)
The first week is so bloody there is no way any normal man would get near his wife – we’re talking oceans here. Nor, I daresay, would any normal new mother even REMOTELY be thinking of having sex. She’s probably still stitched up!
But yeah … 3 weeks of bleeding sounds about right.
Three weeks is probably more normal. I, the Most Fertile Woman on Earth[sup]TM[/sup], only bled for a week with my vaginally delivered son and about 9 days with my c-sectioned daughter. Go figure. She’s 10 weeks old today and I’m on my second period since her birth as we speak. Arrrgh.
Actually, it’s not. It is rare, but it can happen - called "superfetation. Rare, but it does occur - happened to a friend of mine, whose twins were evidently conceived 2 weeks apart. I don’t recall all the details of how they determined that, but they were better than 50% sure it had to have happened that way.
hauss,
The simplest answer is that someone is lying to you.
Another poster has implied it might be your girlfriend. I’ll leave that line of thought alone for now.
Let’s think about her doctor. Were you present on the 20th when her doctor did that sonogram?
Could the doctor be misinterpreting what he/she saw?
Could your girlfriend be misunderstanding what she thought the doctor said to her?
Could you be misunderstanding what your girlfriend told you?
Back to your girlfriend. Is it possible she might have had sex since the childbirth and either not realize it or not wanted to tell you about it? Rape victims will sometimes (understandaly) not want to talk about it. She might be unaware she’s had sex, which could happen in the case of persons wittingly or unwittingly under the influence of some drugs.
In any case, I hope things turn out as happily for you as possible. This has to be strange on your end.