BWAHAHAHA! I haven’t even heard of this show but you made me wake my boyfriend up in the other room.
My evil half-sister-in-law acted like she didn’t know she was pregnant with her third, but since she was wearing her maternity clothes I think we kind of saw through it.
I’m another person who finds it hard to believe. I practically knew I was pregnant from the night I conceived. I had the feeling, afterward, that of all the newlywed “Happy Fun Time” my now-ex and I were having, this time I had gotten knocked up for sure. The feeling did not go away for several weeks, and was confirmed when my ex finally humored me and took me to buy a pregnancy test. The kid is now 7 1/2.
Then again, this is my own personal experience, and I’m aware now that there are people who don’t realize they’re pregnant till they look down and there’s a kid staring up from between their legs. :eek:
My wife didn’t know she was pregnant.
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For a couple weeks.
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THEN SHE GOT A LITTLE CURIOUS ABOUT FEELING LIKE SHIT EVERY MORNING AND THE SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE OF AUNT FLO.
I’ve told the story on here before, but back in my waitressing days (which was before ultrasounds were common) I waited on a rather stunned-looking couple with a newborn in a carrier. They were both big people, and this was a teeny tiny baby. When I admired the baby, they told me the whole story of how they didn’t know she was pregnant and were totally unprepared for this child. The wife had had some kidney problems about a year before, and was taking medication for many months that she thought was responsible for her periods stopping. She’d spot every now and again, but no real periods to speak of. She’d put on a few pounds, and felt unwell, but again…she was on some pretty strong medication. Finally, she started having really severe back pains, and her husband took her to the emergency room, where they told her she was in labor, broke her water and delivered a child within a few minutes. The doctors were worried because the baby had been so quiet during those normally active months, and posited that perhaps the meds she was on had sort of sedated the baby. So now, not only did they have to tell their families, tell the wife’s job she wasn’t coming in to work for a while, and try to come up with money for baby items on short notice, but they had to worry about whether the baby had suffered any developmental issues as a result of the drugs mom was taking for her kidneys.
Like I said…they were one stunned couple. Wish I knew how they got on, but I never saw them again.
I have never been pregnant but I’ve never understood the whole deal of not knowing you were pregnant. How in the world could you not know? It’s a rhetorical question because they will swear until they die that they didn’t know they were preggo.
I don’t want to go into a lot of details, but I have a very intelligent friend who already had one child go for several months before she realized she was pregnant, so I have some sympathy. But not realizing until you’re actually giving birth? That’s just denial.
My cousin who had had one child, had her second 11 year later on the toilet much as you describe. She is a bit big, but not terribly obese. Her first pregnancy and birth had been very difficult, nearly killing her from the accounts I heard. When she gave birth, on the toilet, she thought she had the stomach flu. Her 11 year old son was the only coherent one in the house and called the right people to get her to a hospital. Both mother and father were dumbstruck after the initial yelling.
She is not stupid, nor is she typically oblivious. It was said later that not only did she not think it possible, she likely blocked it out because the thought of going through that nightmare again was unthinkable. On the other hand, it was a pleasant surprise. They had wanted more children originally and were happy to get one without the difficult pregnancy.
I can’t help but stop and watch this show if I am flipping through channels. The reenactments sometimes remind me of old “Unsolved Mysteries”, meaning this is comedy gold to me.
This show makes it seem like a growing epidemic, so now I have the fear that any woman I am standing next to at any given moment could give birth unknowlingly.
Happened to a friend of my mother in the early '70s - this was (IIRC) before the common use of ultrasounds. This story is second-hand from my mother, though I do know the woman. I posted about it in a recent-ish GD thread on this topic.
She was very heavy, had very irregular and small periods anyway, had never been pregnant before, and was desperately trying to get pregnant, to the point that she and her husband were looking into adoption. At one point she really thought she was pregnant, but she went to the doctor (I don’t know what tests he did), and he told her no, she wasn’t. (My WAG at this point is that she may have mentally dismissed/minimized some future symptoms because she was concerned she was ‘making stuff up’ due to her desire to get pregnant. I think people were a lot more likely to take the doctor’s word as The Truth then, too.) Well, of course, she was pregnant. Her baby wasn’t hugely active, she IIRC did continue “spotting” on and off throughout the pregnancy, and she and/or her doctor attributed other symptoms to digestive issues, probably related to her weight. She called my mom with the news that she had a baby soon after the surprise delivery, and Mom misinterpreted “I had a baby!” over the phone as meaning that she got (adopted) a baby; that was corrected completely.
The only time that Mom thought her friend might be pregnant is when she came to visit at our house, and our dog sat protectively at her feet the entire visit. The dog had done this with Mom during her pregnancy, and so Mom teased her a little about how maybe it had worked this time, and her friend said nope, still trying.
I’ve mentioned before that my cousin didn’t know she was pregnant until she was in labour. She went from “You’re pregnant” to “It’s a girl!” in 20 minutes. She’s not a big girl, and my mother had just mentioned to me a couple of weeks earlier that she was concerned that she’d lost more weight and was looking too thin. She swears that she had no idea, no symptoms, didn’t feel the baby moving, kept getting her period, didn’t have any morning sickness and that she and her boyfriend were as completely stunned and blind sided as the rest of us.
Having been pregnant and spent the last two months of it feeling like I didn’t belong on land, being woken up every ten minutes by that very foreign object in my stomach as it rolled over or kicked me, and looking like I had eaten several fully-grown people, I don’t know whether to be envious or disbelieving. I know I couldn’t have hidden that I was pregnant - there was no hiding my belly. Yet she got changed in front of her mother just a couple of days before the baby was born, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about her figure (like I said, my mum was accusing her of getting thinner before the baby was born).
I’ve not been pregnant, but I work with women who are. And having had digestive disorders, I can see how larger women who have them might think that movement and kicking is just more of their gut being unkind. I’ve seen women in full on active labor who are having less pain, and less continual pain, than I’ve had during a particularly ugly digestive episode. So, presuming that fetal movements and kicks are uncomfortable but not painful I can imagine how some women could mistake them for something else entirely.
I remember reading about a woman who was surprised when she gave birth on a Navy ship. Added to the question of “how can she not have known” were questions like “how big can one get in military service without someone noticing” (typically it’s easier to miss pregnancy if you have a lot of weight already) and “did she have PT (physical training – basically calisthenics) every morning?”
I can’t wait to watch this show now. I, too, can’t fathom not realizing I’m pregnant. Some of those kicks really hurt! Plus, some of them are aimed directly at the cervix, especially toward the end. I can’t imagine feeling that much pressure on my pelvic floor without thinking that something must be up.