Sunday, June 22, 2008

oops, i'm in labor ...

OK, let me just start by saying this post is not about me. Just about something I saw on TV last weekend called, get this ... I Didn't know I Was Pregnant. I'm sure you're laughing, even if you've never been pregnant yourself (seriously, how do you miss something like that?). Most of the time it's pretty obvious when someone is knocked up, at least in those last few weeks. But this show chronicled four women who swear up and down that they didn't know they were having a baby (and sometimes two) until the head emerged from the birth canal.

Yet, as crazy as I thought this show was, I could not turn it off. I just sat there trying to figure out how a pregnancy could go unnoticed. (Maybe I'm weird or something but the day I'm late, expect me to be peeing on a stick.)

Basically, all the women had the following things in common.

1. They weren't trying to conceive.
2. They had irregular cycles or no cycles at all.
3. They were overweight, but not obese.
4. They had a complete lack of pregnancy symptoms.

Apparently, those characteristics (in combination) were enough to "hide" a pregnancy. But still, it seems crazy to me. I had two nearly symptomless pregnancies (except the weight gain) with Dizzle and Doodle (OK, with Doodle there were waves of nausea - but no vomiting), yet even so, there were two telltale signs of pregnancy, a lack of a period and fetal movement. I swear at times I thought that my abdomen was going to explode like in that scene from Alien. There was no mistaking the movements for excess gas, as the show suggests (trust me, I've had a lot of gas.) I really can't fathom how this could happen.

Now, I mentioned before that these women had irregular cycles, but I'm pretty sure that while it is OK not to get a monthly period (from a health standpoint), I'm also as sure that there is usually a reason for not getting one (ie. birth control, stress, being underweight, being overweight, PREGNANCY.) Maybe I'm just being naive, but if my body was all out of whack, I would go get it checked out, at least to have some piece of mind. Or maybe I'd just take a pregnancy test.

1 comment:

gba_gf said...

My first pregnancy, with C, I thought I had a sinus infection on top of some kind of stomach bug. For two weeks I was vomiting or sick feeling, had no fever & had a stuffy nose. It was the lack of fever that gave it away. I can't imagine going much longer than I went, which was 2 weeks into my "late" cycle before I noticed the date. I had a really stressful job, and was in a stressful place in my life all around, otherwise I'd like to imagine that I would have caught on sooner. Let me tell you, the words I uttered in that moment were not blog worthy. It was my 1st anniversary. As my belly expanded, I swear that C was doing yoga in there. It stretched and bounced in ways that skin should not move. Fetal movement aside, did the women on the show think their boo boos had suddenly grown for no reason? That their ankles were swollen because they ate too much salt? I'm with you T, I just don't get it.