Don't Forget to Take Your Pill

Have you ever seen that show on the Discovery Health Channel (AKA the Freak Show Network) called, “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant?" I haven’t either, but the title is pretty self-explanatory. What amazes me is that it is a series rather than a one-time special. Apparently, there are enough women out there who either have extremely asymptomatic pregnancies or who are very out of touch with the bodies. And, of course, an audience of people who want to know all about it.

A long time ago, I worked with a woman who found herself in this very situation. She was a clerical worker in the office, and while very sweet, she was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. She was an ample woman, almost as wide as she was tall. She started having what she thought were intestinal issues about six months after she got married. She went to her doctor, who did not diagnose an illness or offer any treatment other than she needed to change her diet and eat more fiber. The doctors just couldn’t find the reason this woman kept having problems with abdominal pain. One day, when she felt really miserable, she stayed home from work to rest. At some point, she thought she needed to make a bowel movement, so she sat on the toilet to do her thing. Imagine her surprise when she went to take a crap and instead shit a screaming baby into the toilet bowl.

True story. The baby was full term and completely normal. The woman thought, looking back, that the symptoms she must have had in her first trimester were just nerves due to her upcoming wedding. She was actually already three months preggers on her wedding day and had no clue. I always felt so bad for her baby boy, because everyone knew he was born in a toilet and mistaken for a really big poo. That’s the kind of thing that will haunt him for his whole life. Truly, it is one of the worst birth stories I have ever heard, and that includes the cashier at Wal-Mart who was on bed rest for placenta previa and suffered a broken pelvis caused by her developing baby.

Well, last week I heard about yet another one of those surprise births. The daughter of one of our acquaintances suddenly got sick, and no one knew why. Like the woman I knew many years ago, this girl was also not petite, but no one noticed or suspected anything making her grow larger over the course of the past nine months, including her. I could see how at 19, with no husband, she might have been concerned about telling her parents of her condition, but apparently it was a surprise to her as well.

She was admitted to the hospital after suffering what the doctors thought was a seizure, even though she never had seizures before. While inpatient, shazaam, she had a baby. It turns out that isolated seizure was actually preeclampsia. I asked the person who told me the story if the girl had a boyfriend, but he said she did not have a serious one. I guess it’s more serious than she thought. She might not have a boyfriend, but she does have a baby daddy.

It is hard enough becoming a new mother with eight or nine months of warning. You can plan for the baby, buy all sorts of stuff for the nursery, take your pre-natal vitamins, and stop drinking and smoking and eating brie and tuna fish and snorting coke, if that’s your thing. But to not know? To go to the hospital because you don’t know what is wrong with you, or to sit down to take the monster dump of a lifetime and end up a new parent, well, that’s just as fucked up as a two-headed snake.

To all those unaware moms out there, I offer up my sympathy. Nature has truly made you the butt in a sick joke that you will have to think about for the rest of your life, never quite getting the punch line. If that doesn’t turn you into a hypochondriac, I don’t know what will.