Woman Goes To Hospital on Christmas and Gets Unexpected Gift: A Full-Term Baby Boy

"When Melanie Smith was 18, a doctor told her she would not be able to carry a child. She accepted the diagnosis and stopped imagining motherhood as part of her future. "He said I had a hostile uterus," Smith tells TODAY.com, using an outdated term, once applied to uterine scarring or other conditions believed to affect fertility. She also had a history of irregular periods, including once going an entire year without menstruating."

"'I did think it was a little weird that the pain was intermittent and not constant,' she says. Those sensations were, in fact, contractions. Hospital staff quickly determined that Smith was in active labor. The discovery stunned her. She had received no prenatal care and had not known she was pregnant, experiencing none of the symptoms she associated with pregnancy - no morning sickness, no significant weight gain. She did have occasional back pain that she chalked up to a 2020 surgery."

"Smith is part of a small and often misunderstood group of women who experience what experts call cryptic pregnancies, cases in which a person does not realize they are pregnant until late in gestation, or sometimes not until delivery. Research suggests such pregnancies occur in roughly one in 475 cases after 20 weeks. About one in 2,500 cases are not discovered until birth. "I didn't have a car seat, clothes, diapers, a pediatrician, nothing," Smith says. "We weren't set up for this at all.""

Melanie Smith received a diagnosis at 18 that she could not carry a child and later experienced irregular periods, including a year without menstruation. At 28 she felt late-Christmas pain she interpreted as cramping or constipation, then presented to a hospital where staff found her in active labor. She had received no prenatal care and noted no typical pregnancy symptoms such as morning sickness or significant weight gain. She lacked baby supplies or preparations. Cryptic pregnancies are uncommon but documented, occurring in roughly one in 475 cases after 20 weeks and about one in 2,500 undetected until birth.

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