I am making myself paranoid.

[apocalypsos]

Why am I watching I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant?

Show: "She only gained ten pounds."
Me: "Hey, I've gained ten pounds!"
Show: "She still got her period like normal."
Me: "OMG, I still get my period like normal!"
Show: "She didn't even feel any movement."
Me: "Holy Christmas, I never feel any movement either!"
Show: "And then she had a baby."
Me: *gapes*
My hymen: "Oh, sweetie ..."

Comments

[elucreh.livejournal.com]

Oh my god...that show...are you fucking with me? That show ACTUALLY EXISTS?

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Oh, it exists, all right. And apparently now they've found enough women that this has happened to to warrant a series as opposed to one terror-inducing hour-long special.

*blink*

[seferin.livejournal.com]

They going to feature a girl named Mary during sweeps week?

[thebitterguy]

I was going to ask if there was some... NEWS you felt you should share.

[lisaofdoom.livejournal.com]

That show sounds horrifying. o_O

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Well, let's see -- tonight's episode featured one woman who ended giving birth into a toilet in the bathroom of the fast food place she worked at, and the other one gave birth in a campground lavatory which led to the baby falling to the concrete floor and the umbilical cord snapping. Both babies turned out perfectly healthy, but OH MY GOD.

[thesumo.livejournal.com]

are you sure it's a series? that's the same episode i saw a few weeks ago haha. oh my GOD indeed...

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

It might have rerun. I just know there was a special from a year or so ago that reran all the time, and this new one, so it just seemed like, "Hey, new series!"

[acetal.livejournal.com]

Bungee!

I leave you with that mental image. You're welcome.

[writerrising.livejournal.com]

I truly have never understood how you could -not- know you were pregnant. I mean, these women say they never feel any movement...but, isn't there always fetal movement?

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Not always. Every pregnancy isn't always the same. Some people gain a lot of weight, some people don't. And then, of course, not every woman's period comes like clockwork. From the stories I've read about this sort of thing, it's inevitably a heavier woman with irregular periods who either doesn't feel any movement or attributes it to digestive movements.

[writerrising.livejournal.com]

sigh. I find it kind of sad that some people are out of touch with their bodies to the point that they can attribute fetal movements to digestive movements. I try to stay way from these stories. Lol. I guess they bring out my judgmental side.

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

It seems that when they've told these stories on this show, nearly all of them aren't feeling the fetal movement, and the ones who do are first-time moms who don't know what their body is supposed to feel like when it's pregnant. And that's if they knew they were pregnant -- these are women who aren't gaining weight, keep having periods or are used to missing them, have barely any symptoms if they have any at all, and basically have no reason whatsoever to believe they might be pregnant. So if you're absolutely positive you're not pregnant like all of these women are, why would you attribute the barest of movements to an infant? "I'm showing absolutely no difference in weight, period frequency, health, or appetite, but my tummy's rumbling strangely. I think there's a baby in me!" It's a little out-there when everything else in you is telling you, "No, no, NO."

I mean, I can buy that there are women out there who don't know they're pregnant until there's a baby coming out of their birth canal, with the right set of circumstances.

[conuly]

In one case I remember (from print media, not TV), the woman *did* feel the baby kicking - but as the baby was positioned oddly he was kicking her back and she figured it was cramps. I think she was breastfeeding or something and hadn't gotten her period back yet as well, and having gone through one pregnancy she didn't think that backache was the sign to look for.

Or a friend of mine was very nearly in this position because as an older woman who had *never* had a regular period - she described it as "once a year, tops" - she believed her whole adult life that she simply couldn't get pregnant without a lot of effort, and now that she was older it *really* wasn't on her radar.

And don't forget the case I linked to below, the woman who had triplets. In her case she probably didn't feel the fetal movement because, as she had triplets, there *was* no fetal movement, or very little. One baby is cramped enough in there, but three?

tmi alert

[astaria51.livejournal.com]

To be fair, a lot of people have super irregular periods. Mine is on a 40 day cycle when I'm lucky, and skips two months on a regular basis - and when I get it it can last a week or two days and be heavy or spotting.

Factor in that some of these women undoubtedly have babies who had limited fetal movement (especially if some of them had birth defects), are used to cramping if they do have PCOS or endomytriosis...

and the fact that many women spot throughout pregnancy rather than stopping periods altogether...

and the COMPLETE LACK of sexual education in this country:

voila, a new show.

[minim_calibre]

(Disclaimer, I KNEW I WAS PREGNANT. Just to get that out of the way.)

There are a few factors that could lead to muffling the feeling of movement/mistaking it for something else. A placenta that's toward the front of the uterus will totally delay when you actually feel movement (I could be looking at it on the ultrasound screen and not feeling it when I was far enough along that you'd think feeling the kicks would have been obvious), and excess weight will add to that.

If you have a history of gastrointestinal issues, kicks that are thus muffled could totally feel like gas. (Sometimes, I have gas bubbles now that totally feel like kicks. And then I get paranoid and worry that my IUD has fallen out or something. ANYHOW.)

I knew someone in college who was 6 months along before she found out she was pregnant. She'd been told she was probably infertile, and assumed the general bloating/irritation feeling was stomach issues due to the amount of coffee she'd been drinking.

[writerrising.livejournal.com]

I've always been able to understand not knowing you were pregnant until you were very far along, 6 months or more, but I guess I always got a little mystified by women who didn't know until the baby was actually being born. I can see how it could happen though.

[minim_calibre]

I expect L wouldn't have known until she was in labor if she hadn't been completely convinced she had some sort of Stomach Ailment of DOOOOOOM and gone to the doctor for it.

(A lot of the deliveries I've read about weren't quite full term, as well.)

[etoilepb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've known (and known of, in that friends-of-friends kind of way) two girls who didn't know they were pregnant until 16 or 17 weeks, because they exhibited next to no symptoms except heartburn.

(That said, 17 weeks is totally different from 36 weeks, heh.)

[ladyphoenixia.livejournal.com]

(Random here from metaquotes)

My Mum didn't know she was pregnant with me until she was about five months along either, as she was on the pill (so didn't exactly expect it), and so skinny that she wasn't getting periods anyway... plus, the first time she asked the doctor about it, her tests came back negative. Definitely can happen.

[fortuna-juvat.livejournal.com]

One chick already sold that line. It's going to be much harder now.

PS. To top those stories, no less than 4 physicians palpated an abdomen (ranging from first year resident to seasoned ER doc) and not ONE of them could tell a morbidly obese woman with "stomach pains" was pregnant.

She couldn't pee, the ultrasound was tied up in a nasty trauma case and 4 hours later she was crowning.

[exsequar.livejournal.com]

Wait - is it physically possible to get your period while pregnant? *gapes a little*

Also, me and my best friend have had conversations about how when our periods are late we feel a totally irrational surge of paranoia. Our hymens should roll their eyes at each other.

(What, you started with the anthropomorphizing!)

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

They keep having doctors on during these specials and the usual answer seems to be, "That's not a period, that's spotting."

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

People who have light periods can mistake them. People like me who have PCOS and (before diagnosis and medication) could go 10 months without a full period, just occasional spotting, wouldn't even notice. And PCOS strongly contributes to abdominal weight gain and infertility, so it wouldn't surprise me if many of the women in this story are fat, have irregular periods and have been told they were infertile in the first place.

[looleebelle.livejournal.com]

*giggles*

[supesfan88.livejournal.com]

Lmao



that is all.

[the-jackalope.livejournal.com]

Every SINGLE time I'm a little bit late, I get all paranoid. And then I remember, oh yes you have to have sex. And I'm good. And yet there is this lingering doubt in the back of my head until it shows up.

To be honest, I blame the Bible.

[torificus.livejournal.com]

THAT SOUNDS LIKE THE MOST AMAZING TRAINWRECKY SHOW EVER I LOVE IT.

Ah, but was she pregnant with TRIPLETS?

[conuly]

http://www.babble.com/CS/blogs/strollerderby/archive/2006/12/31/uk-mom-delivers-twins-and-triplets-in-twelve-month-span.aspx

[paradoxymoron.livejournal.com]

Wait a minute. YOU'RE PREGNANT?! GODDAMN MIDICLORIANS!

[purple-smurf.livejournal.com]

Hey, I was going to start on the subject of the unexpected return of Halley's Comet, but midiclorians work much better!

[sweill.livejournal.com]

Yeah, midiclorians beat whatever I was going to say.

[tigress35.livejournal.com]

I've heard about that show and it freaked me out.

And I had the same thing the other day, when my period was ten days late, and if not for the unfortunate circumstances of not having been anywhere near a naked man in any amount of time feasible to have caused a pregnancy, I would have been buying a pregnancy test like, every day, because that never happens to me. But the thought still crossed my mind, for some reason?! Our brains are cruel to us.

[fyrdrakken]

See, I read The Marquise of O for a university class, being the story of a woman who got pregnant without knowing how. (Basically she fainted at one point and wound up being raped while she was out.) And that's not a good story to have floating up in my mind when my period is late even though to the best of my knowledge it's been several years since I'd had sex (with another person, anyway). Especially since I'd mostly gotten over the irregular periods I used to have and settled into four-weeks-and-a-bit -- having a two-months-and-a-half gap gets a bit worrisome.

[theliel.livejournal.com]

funny enough i was reading this while humming 'halalujah' (by leanard cohen orginally, but the jeff buckly version has rended some of my grey matter and continues to dominate my frontal lobe) about the time i got to 'remember the time i moved and you, and the holy dove was moving too..'

but wow.
scary.

i'm glad absitnance only folks never got ahold of this or else teenage boys will never get laid again, except by kreepy large cats (mountian lions, panthers, cougers and jaguars).

[animamea.livejournal.com]

...and then I put you on metaquotes, cos that shit is HILARIOUS.