Amanda Prentice prayed for years that she and her husband would become pregnant, but she never got to enjoy that excitement of seeing two lines appear on a pregnancy test or seeing her growing baby on an ultrasound. Instead, after struggling for four years with what she thought was infertility, one day she woke up, and there was her baby girl -- the one she had unknowingly delivered -- waiting for her.
According to WSMV-TV, Prentice became pregnant without knowing it and carried the baby nearly nine months with no hint that anything was different. It wasn't until she started having seizures and her husband took her to the hospital that they had any idea they were going to be parents ... and soon.
After a dangerous spike in blood pressure, Amanda fell unconscious, and her family learned why. It was due to pregnancy complications (which sound much like preeclampsia), and doctors delivered her baby five hours later. When she awoke two days later, doctors delivered the news to her.
She told the station: "The doctor came in and said, 'I've got good news and bad news.' He said, 'Your blood pressure has skyrocketed here in the last few days, but you've got a baby.'" And that's when she met her beautiful, perfectly healthy, little girl, who she named Allie McKinley Rose.
A beautiful and touching story for sure, but not drastically different from others we've heard over the years about women who give birth without ever knowing they're pregnant. In fact, TLC has a whole series titled I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant. Still, each of these stories amazes me and really makes me wonder how on earth this could happen.
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Is it because these women had incredibly easy pregnancies that didn't involve the sheer and utter exhaustion, the nausea, backaches, and other oh-so-telling symptoms that both of mine did? Or is it because much of what we attribute to pregnancy is really in our minds ... or at least amplified by the way we think we're supposed to feel. I would have tried to harm you severely had you suggested it was all in my head while it was happening, but looking back, I do wonder. Have we become so accustomed to thinking pregnancy is full of aches and pains that to some degree we bring at least some of them on ourselves?
I don't know the answer, and it would be pretty cruel to do any sort of placebo test to try and get a scientific conclusion. But each of these cases does always make me wonder how much better I might have felt during my pregnancies if I didn't know I was pregnant?
Do you feel like just knowing you're pregnant can make symptoms worse? Can you ever imagine carrying a baby to term, not knowing you were pregnant?
Image via WSMV-TV
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Comments 124
It seems to me almost ALL these women who don't know have similarities. They have prior conditions that make their periods absent or irregular. Many are obese or overweight (not all, of course) which can hide growth and make it difficult to feel baby inside, especially depending on the position of the placenta. I had an anterior placenta my last pregnancy, and I rarely felt my daughter move. And pregnancy symptoms aside from the belly and the periods can easily be written off as a flu bug, stress at work, being overtired or hungrier than usual. And ALL of them never see the doctor for these symptoms. When pregnancy isn't the first thing on your mind you don't attribute your symptoms to that.
I was crazy with hormones when I was pregnant. My behavior was the only reason I decided to take a pregnancy test. I did know what to expect but I i wouldn't think about it it would just happen to me. I was not big on eating before I found out I was pregnant because I used to weigh about 285 and I had gotten down to 165 and stayed there for about 3 years. So when I got pregnant I realized very quickly that not eating was a big mistake. It made me violently ill and dropped my blood sugar if I didn't eat regularly and I was pretty moody Im really not much for being emotional but everything made me cry while I was pregnant especially babies.