Grand entrances

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This article was published 04/11/2017 (3178 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Call it a case of unexpected expecting.

When Beth Clay of Venice, Calif., arrived at a hospital emergency room experiencing excruciating abdominal pains last month, she suspected she had kidney stones.

When she left the hospital, the 45-year-old woman had a brand new baby boy.

According to a host of online news reports, Clay didn’t have a clue she was pregnant until the newest member of her family, Liam Ryder Clay, entered the world.

“The shock is just amazing,” Beth, who has two adult children, told the media of her surprise pregnancy.

She said her doctors had a theory about why she never knew she was expecting a third child until she went into labour.

“The doctor feels sure that he (the baby) was behind everything, behind my kidneys, behind my liver,” the shocked new mom told reporters. “I was in tip-top shape, and then the next three days here’s this little rascal.”

Surprise births are rare, but not unheard of, with some figures showing one in 450 pregnant women doesn’t know her status until more than halfway through her term, while one in 2,500 is oblivious until labour begins.

Clay is definitely in interesting company, as we see from today’s freshly delivered list of Five Births That Caught The Moms By Complete Surprise:

5) Caught by surprise — The Unconscious Mom

The special delivery — Amanda Prentice and her husband, Billy, had been trying to have children for about four years, without success.

They were even contemplating adoption, but everything changed in April 2012 when Billy returned to their Lawrenceburg, Tenn., home from a hunting trip and discovered his wife lying in bed, unable to answer questions.

According to news reports, there was blood on the floor from where she had bit her tongue during an apparent seizure. Her husband raced her to their local hospital, and Amanda was then airlifted to a larger medical centre in Nashville, where she reportedly spent two days unconscious.

When she woke up, a doctor delivered some shocking news. “The doctor came in and said, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’” she told a local TV station at the time. “He said, ‘Your blood pressure has skyrocketed here in the last few days, but you’ve got a baby.’”

It turns out her seizures had been a complication of pregnancy, a condition to which Amanda says she was totally oblivious.

“I never felt her move, I wore the same clothes that I had worn for two years,” the new mom said at the time, noting the only potential symptoms were that her feet and ankles were swollen.

Five hours after receiving the big news, the baby, Allie McKinley Rose, made her debut. The new dad was shocked, but delighted. “Five hours after they first told me that she was pregnant, I was a daddy,” he told a local TV station. “Where most people have eight, nine months, I had five hours.”

Amanda used to be skeptical of the women she’d see on the reality TV show I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, but that’s changed. “I was one of these that was saying, ‘They’ve gotta know; they’ve gotta know.’ Now: ‘No, you don’t have to know,’” the happy mom sighed. “If the good Lord wants it there, then he’s going to put it there.”

 

4) Caught by surprise — The Marathon Mom

The special delivery — After a 10-mile training run for Grandma’s Half Marathon in her hometown of Duluth, Minn., in 2013, Trish Staine was in pain.

News reports at the time say she was experiencing severe cramps after her two-hour practice run. “I was yelling and screaming — I thought I was dying. I didn’t know what was going on,” she recalled at the time.

Naturally, her family called an ambulance and the ailing runner was rushed to the hospital, where everyone expected a diagnosis of a pinched nerve, a kidney stone or possibly a burst appendix. But the nurse treating the long-distance competitor found something totally unexpected — a fetal heartbeat.

“And I’m, like, looking around, like, no, I don’t believe it,” Staine said during an interview on the Today Show.

She had multiple reasons for being in a state of total disbelief. As a mother of two — a seven-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son — she knew exactly what it felt like to be pregnant and she hadn’t been feeling that way. She hadn’t gained any weight, there was no “baby bump,” she hadn’t missed any periods, and most of all, her husband, John, had undergone a vasectomy. Staine’s cramps were the first signs of labour, and a few hours after arriving at the hospital, she gave birth to a six-pound, six-ounce baby girl.

The newborn arrived five weeks early, but was perfectly healthy. “I wouldn’t mind just naming her Miracle, and calling her Mira for short,” Staine said on the Today Show. And she kept that promise, adding to a family that already included her two biological children, two foster children and three boys her husband had brought into the marriage.

“I’ve always been skeptical about all these TV shows with people saying, ‘I didn’t know I was pregnant,’” she said. “You cannot be pregnant and not know about it. So as soon as I had her, I was like, ‘I’m a believer!’”

 

3) Caught by surprise — The Trans-Pacific Mom

The special delivery — Ada Guan, 23, and her boyfriend, Wesley Branch, 24, were filled with excitement when they boarded an Air Canada flight from Calgary to Japan in May 2015.

The Victoria, B.C., couple were going to visit family in Tokyo. Somewhere above Russia, Guan began experiencing chest pains and “it just got worse from there,” Branch told CTV News at the time.

The pain was reportedly so bad, she ended up trying to get comfortable on the floor of the plane and was moved into first class, where she thought she could feel something wanting to come out of her.

Guan knew she couldn’t be expecting, because she’d previously taken a pregnancy test and it came back negative. So she recalled being just a little shocked when it became clear she was about to give birth mid-flight. For the record, it was Mother’s Day.

The flight crew and three doctors who happened to be on board helped her through five-and-a-half hours of labour before the newest passenger — seven-pound, eight-ounce Chloe Grace Guan Branch — showed up on the arrivals board and generated headlines around the world.

“I really had no idea,” Guan told CBC. “She said, ‘Babe, something fell out of me,’” boyfriend Branch recalled of the moment his child was born. When the plane arrived, the new mom and baby were rushed to hospital and later released.

“It’s been a challenge, but who can’t take care of a baby?” Branch sniffed in comments that later sparked an angry backlash online. “If you have cats, you can take care of a baby.”

The couple were also accused of being greedy when they initially sought $50,000 in crowdfunding donations to cover medical expenses in Japan, but later reduced their asking amount to $5,000. “It made me really mad. It made me want to reply to these people, but I said to myself I won’t. I am just going to raise my baby,” Branch told CBC after returning to Canada.

 

2) Caught by surprise — The Winnipeg Mom

The special delivery — In 2009, a Winnipeg woman made international headlines for a surprising reason — she unwittingly delivered a baby boy while on the toilet.

At the time, Heather Richard, 32, told Free Press columnist Lindor Reynolds she had no idea she was pregnant. “I thought, ‘What the (expletive).’ I didn’t know it was a baby. I thought it was my intestines. When I looked closer I saw that it was my baby. His head was in the water.”

The December day she gave birth, Richard had been in bed at her boyfriend’s house when her water broke. She cleaned up and returned to her Flora Avenue house, where she continued to experience stomach pains. Hours later, she went to call for an ambulance for her cramps, but had to rush back to the bathroom.

When she realized she’d given birth, Richard said she called for her 15-year-old brother to help, but that proved fruitless. “In a made-for-the-movies moment, two police officers came to the door,” Reynolds wrote. “Richard was wanted on an outstanding warrant for theft. They heard her screaming, ran down the hall to the bathroom and saved Isaiah’s life. He had a small skull fracture from hitting the bowl. ‘Instead of arresting me, they saved me,’” Richard said at the time.

Over the next few weeks, Richard saw the best and worst of the city. Some offered gifts of baby clothes, diapers, blankets and a stroller. Others offered cruelty. “After the story of her unusual delivery broke, Richard became the brunt of tasteless jokes,” Reynolds wrote in January 2010. “The fact Richard is poor, Aboriginal and unemployed made her fair game in some quarters… she starts to cry. She may not have known her baby was coming, but she loves him.”

In the end, the new mom thanked Free Press readers for their kindness and vowed to be a good mom. “Of course, we’re going to make it,” the surprise mom promised Reynolds. “That’s my angel.”

 

1) Caught by surprise — The Military Mom

The special delivery — A lot of things can happen to soldiers serving on the front lines in wartime, but having a baby isn’t usually one of them.

In 2012, however, Lance Bombardier Lynette Pearce, a 28-year-old British soldier fighting on the front lines in Afghanistan, went into labour and gave birth to a baby boy five weeks prematurely.

The baby was born in the field hospital of military base Camp Bastion two days after Pearce began complaining of severe abdominal cramps. It marked the first time a British soldier had given birth on the front line, although up to 200 servicewomen had been sent home since 2003 from Iraq and Afghanistan after it was discovered they were pregnant, BBC News reported at the time.

Soldiers are typically given pre-deployment medical exams, but women are not routinely given pregnancy tests. In Pearce’s case, she had no idea she was expecting a child. “She reportedly passed every fitness test while pregnant and completed all training, including a gruelling eight-mile march with a 35-pound backpack,” the BBC noted.

The child’s birth came just four days after the camp had been attacked by the Taliban, an assault that destroyed six aircraft and killed two U.S. Marines. A special pediatric retrieval team was dispatched to Afghanistan to provide care for the new mom and her surprise baby on the flight home.

Pearce named the boy Immanuel Izadore, after her two younger brothers. The child’s father is a fellow Fijian soldier serving with the army. “She said, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong. It’s just that I gave birth during working hours,’” her mother, Evikali Suka Pearce, revealed.

 

Not knowing you’re expecting isn’t the end of the world. What’s truly important is how you react when your little bundle of joy makes a surprise entrance.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca