What Did Katie Did When She Was a Baby

Westward hen Klara Dollan, then 22, woke upwards at 4am on the day she was due to get-go her new task, she thought her agonising stomach cramps signalled her period being "back with a vengeance". She had been taking the pill with no suspension for more than half dozen months, but had stopped about two weeks before. The waves of pain left her stake and shaking, merely she didn't feel she could phone call in sick on her offset mean solar day – and then she took some paracetamol on her female parent'due south advice, and caught the motorbus then the tube from the home they shared in Cricklewood in northward-west London into the urban center.

Hours after, Dollan was in Hampstead'south Royal Free hospital, cradling a newborn baby girl: completely good for you and carried to term. Dollan had given birth past herself in the bath of her flat, after beingness sent home ill from work; a neighbour had heard her screams of labour and called an ambulance. When Dollan rang her female parent and told her to come to the motherhood ward, the reply was: "Just you weren't pregnant this forenoon!"

Amelia, now 3, was a "complete surprise", says Dollan, which many struggle to believe. How could she not take known she was pregnant? Simply the more pertinent question may be: why would she have thought she was?

Dollan had cleaved upward with her beau (Amelia's father) 5 months before her daughter was built-in, and she was used to not getting periods. She had gained a piffling weight, but chalked that up to the breakup. A mirror selfie she took betrays no trace of her being seven and a half months pregnant. "There was nothing showing. I wasn't feeling information technology. I had no symptoms, no cravings, no nausea – nothing. I was out of the loop of my pregnancy."

In fact, the first time the thought she might exist pregnant crossed her mind was as she was giving nascency. By this bespeak, it was articulate this was no period. "My body was simply telling me to push the hurting away. Then I saw a caput coming out." What was she thinking? "I couldn't tell you, honestly. I was in accented shock."

Last week, at that place were reports effectually the earth of an farthermost case of a woman being surprised by her own full-term pregnancy: a Bangladeshi woman gave birth to a healthy and expected babe boy, only to learn nearly a month subsequently that she was carrying twins in a 2d uterus (they were also born good for you, 26 days after her first child). The physical circumstances in that case, and the fact that the adult female knew she was pregnant with i kid – only not three – clearly make information technology highly unusual. Simply the phenomenon of a woman carrying a baby to term without knowing she is meaning is more common than ane might think; every bit Dollan found out after giving birth to Amelia, this is known equally "cryptic pregnancy". A 2002 paper published in the British Medical Periodical estimated that it occurs in about one in every ii,500 pregnancies, suggesting about 320 cases in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland every year.

"This is not a particularly unusual miracle," says Helen Cheyne, a professor of midwifery at the University of Stirling's Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Enquiry Unit in Glasgow. "It's rare – only it's not that rare." In midwifery and obstetrics and gynaecology circles, she says, if y'all haven't come across a cryptic pregnancy yourself, it is non unusual to know someone – or know someone who knows someone – who has.

Early in Cheyne's career as a clinical midwife, in 1982 or 1983, she remembers caring for a woman in the postnatal ward of the Princess Royal motherhood hospital in Glasgow who had non known she was pregnant until she went into labour. She had given nativity before – by then her children were teenagers – and she had chalked up her irregular periods and weight gain to age. Cheyne remembers her and her husband being in full stupor. "I've never forgotten that. She was completely credible."

And however, she adds, information technology is "very, very hard to get your head around". "The feeling of a baby moving inside you – if you've had children, it's very hard to imagine how yous might not recognise that for what information technology is. Having an 8lb baby within you …" She laughs. She also adds that it is not only possible for significantly overweight women, as is normally assumed.

Although the research is sparse – as one might expect, given the fundamental element of surprise – Cheyne says cryptic pregnancies have been recorded around the earth, dating dorsum centuries. In fact, it was more understandable when pregnancy diagnoses were dependent on indicators such as the loss of periods and nausea. With highly accurate modern tests, says Cheyne: "It's very like shooting fish in a barrel to diagnose pregnancy – if you await to exist pregnant."

Dollan at seven and a one-half months pregnant: 'It's the just total body shot I have during my pregnancy'

But the miracle cannot be explained away as women but non feeling or noticing the signs of pregnancy, variable though they are. "Many people who are non expecting to get significant do go pregnant, and recognise that they are," says Cheyne, adding that that is true fifty-fifty of women in war zones, refugee camps and other challenging situations where there may not be admission to tests or healthcare. "If pregnancy symptoms were generally nebulous and not easily detected, [ambiguous pregnancies] would happen all the fourth dimension – so I think information technology must be something more than particular to the symptoms experienced by these particular women."

Cryptic pregnancy has been reported as a "psychological miracle", says Cheyne, but she does non believe that applies to all cases. "Pregnancy is obviously a physical thing, but becoming a mother is social and psychological equally well – maybe pregnancy is also."

Understandably, when cases make headlines (a representative example: "Woman had no thought she was pregnant – until she gave nascency in the toilet"), they tend to be received with incredulity, scepticism and lurid interest, as the stuff of lather operas and low-hire documentary series. 15-twelvemonth-sometime Sonia's "surprise infant" on EastEnders in 2000 made a bright impression on a generation of immature women, while the US television series I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant ran for four seasons. (In 2015, it was reprised for special episodes almost women who had not i simply two cryptic pregnancies, titled I Notwithstanding Didn't Know I Was Pregnant.)

That a woman could undergo so transformative a physiological experience as pregnancy without having any awareness of it seems to trigger deep-seated disbelief, peculiarly among those who have experienced pregnancy. Dollan says people have questioned her common sense, her connection to her own body, and even the truthfulness of her story. She has found some mothers to be specially judgmental.

"When I tell them I didn't accept whatever cravings or morning sickness, that I didn't accept besides bad a labour – that I just walked through pregnancy, if you will – they are like: 'How could you not know?' And almost: 'How could you alive with yourself not knowing?'" she says. "There's a huge stigma, not only existence a young woman who'southward pregnant, but a young woman not knowing she's meaning."

What about the reaction from men? "I don't retrieve they grasp it at all. Any human being I've told has been similar, 'aye, absurd', and seemed to have forgotten instantly."

After she went public near her story on This Morning four and a half months afterwards giving birth, Dollan says she was contacted past many women who had non spoken out nigh their own cryptic pregnancies out of embarrassment. For her, the proof of her ambiguous pregnancy is self-evident. "All I can say to anyone who thinks I was hiding it is: why would I? Non only would I be putting my health at risk, I would be putting my child's wellness at chance."

That Amelia was carried to term and born healthy, without assistance, was a "miracle", says Dollan, given that she had been working 12-60 minutes days, lx-hour weeks in her hospitality job for her entire pregnancy. "I'd not lived the life of a pregnant woman for the past eight months. I was a bar managing director, for Christ'south sake. I was carrying crates of alcohol upwardly flights of stairs until I was eight months pregnant."

Risk is inherent to cryptic pregnancy, in the gestation period merely most acutely in the human activity of childbirth. Women can go into labour without medical assistance, sometimes in dangerous situations or entirely alone. Tragic cases where the child has been born dead or has died presently after birth have led to the mother's prosecution, says Cheyne, particularly historically. "In a less agreement society, a woman could exist charged with infanticide. People would say: 'Y'all must take known you were significant – otherwise how else would this happen?'"

Fifty-fifty a relatively straightforward birth of a healthy infant can be highly traumatic. "Nigh parents have nine months to gear up," says Dollan. "I had two seconds – maybe a minute. Instantly, my life changed for e'er."

Dissimilar in Dollan and the Bangladeshi mother'southward cases, past trauma tin be an influential factor in pregnancies going unacknowledged, says Dr Sylvia White potato Tighe, a midwifery lecturer and the course managing director at the Section of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Limerick, Republic of ireland. For her doctorate, Tighe studied concealed pregnancy: where women hide their babies from others and frequently, on some level, themselves. Given the link, she eschews the term "cryptic pregnancy" in favour of the broader catch-all "denied pregnancy", which takes in the possibility of both conscious and subconscious rejection (although she considers the old far more than common).

The thirty women she interviewed revealed "fluctuating levels of sensation" of their pregnancies, says Tighe. Some told her, years afterward the fact, that "they absolutely knew" even though they had said at the time that they hadn't. Others had confided in one person – ofttimes a partner, a family member or a health professional – before denying information technology to anybody else, sometimes in response to that reaction.

The chief motivator, she found, was fear: these women were terrified, often for their own survival. There was likewise a close association between concealed pregnancy and trauma such as child sexual abuse, sexual set on and domestic violence, applicative to xi of her xxx interviewees.

The remainder reported feeling more silenced by the social stigma of an unplanned pregnancy, fearing retribution or loss of command of their lives. (Although not all her case studies were Irish, Tighe said the country's cultural resistance to unplanned pregnancies was a factor.) As such curtained pregnancy could be "externally and internally mediated", says Tighe, 1 response was to cope by abstention. "They might get this awareness of 'Could I be significant?', but they shut it down considering a pregnancy, in their current life circumstances, is a really major crisis."

Often the touch on of this was only fully revealed with fourth dimension, and in many cases therapy. Her interviewees had been reflecting, says Tighe: "Whether information technology was vi years or 30 years afterwards the event, they were looking dorsum and they were fix to talk … It'due south like a process of coming to terms." At the time, even so, they might feel but terror. 1 case study maintained that she had not known that she was pregnant until her tertiary interview.

"We tin avoid thoughts – nosotros can push them from our minds," says Tighe, especially if there are factors such as contraception or other medical explanations that tin bolster that denial. One case study, a nurse from rural Ireland, recalled "blocking the idea". "She said: 'If I thought I felt a movement, I told myself maybe I had an ovarian cyst.' She did not want to go there in terms of acknowledging that she was pregnant."

These women's desperate measures, says Tighe, are indicative of the need for an compassionate response to concealed pregnancy from healthcare professionals in particular – one that takes into business relationship the lasting impacts of trauma on individuals' approaches to motherhood. Sensational media reporting, as well, did not assistance women to feel they could come forward.

For those women who had not experienced significant trauma but concealed their pregnancies, Tighe says, having a child was only not function of their "life plan".

Dollan says that having a baby with her ex-boyfriend, anile 22, was not part of her plan. Merely she is also unequivocal: she did not know she was pregnant until she was in labour. "I would have had no qualms near telling my family if I did. Apparently, I would have been nervous to tell them – but in that location would have been a party, yous know?"

She is also glowing about the joy that Amelia has brought into her and her female parent's lives. "It'due south funny she's so lively," she says, "because I didn't feel her moving around."

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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/31/cryptic-pregnancies-i-didnt-know-i-was-having-a-baby-until-i-saw-its-head