She DIDN'T KNOW she was PREGNANT for 9 months…

It is possible for you to go through pregnancy and labor without knowing for a good nine months. If you are new to my channel, I am Dr. Amarachi Ijeoma. I am a fertility physician and my channel focuses on everything women's health and fertility. So if this is the kind of content you're interested in, keep watching. When a woman is pregnant and she doesn't know that she's pregnant, it is a condition called cryptic pregnancy. It is also called denied pregnancy. In cryptic pregnancy, a woman only finds out that she's pregnant very late in the pregnancy or when she is in labor. It is a rare condition and studies have shown that one woman out of every 400 or 500 women will get to about 20 weeks of pregnancy that is about five months of pregnancy before they realize that they're pregnant. The reason a woman can go through pregnancy without knowing is not clear. It can leave your family, your friends, your doctor confused. But there are some explanations for this. For example, mental health issues that may keep you from recognizing or even accepting that you're going to have a baby. For some women, they bleed throughout their pregnancy or they may have intermittent spotting that is spotting every now and then throughout their pregnancy. Normally, some women will have what we call implantation bleeding two weeks after they get pregnant and this bleeding is usually light. So some women that on a normal day have light menstrual flu, they may mistake this implantation bleeding as their period. Even in some healthy pregnancies, some women will have intermittent spotting throughout the pregnancy. So if this woman is now somebody that on a normal day has light bleeding, she might mistake it throughout her pregnancy as period. So she wouldn't know that she's pregnant. Some women don't gain weight or have baby bumps. Pregnancy is different for every woman. If a woman is overweight or she's someone that doesn't gain weight as her pregnancy is progressing, she might not know that she's pregnant. Or if she started dieting or working out very early in pregnancy, she might be losing weight instead of gaining weight. For some women, it's because they've been battling with infertility and they were told by their doctor or healthcare providers that they will never have children. So when they get pregnant, they would not believe it. Or if it is an older woman, for example, in her early 50s and she believes that she can no longer get pregnant, so when she gets pregnant, she may confuse the pregnancy symptoms with menopausal symptoms. Or when a woman takes a home pregnancy test and it shows negative. Most of these home pregnancy test kits have high accuracy rates but it doesn't mean that they are never wrong. So it is possible for her to get a false negative result. Sometimes it's because the woman did not follow the directions on the pregnancy test kit accurately or she took the test too early that the HCG levels are not high enough in her body to be detected as a positive result on a pregnancy test kit. And then there are some women that don't have regular periods on a normal day. For example, women with PCOS. PCOS is polycystic ovarian syndrome. Women with this condition usually have fewer periods or no periods at all. Some women with PCOS can see their periods only two times in a year, sometimes just four times in a year. So when they miss their periods, it's a normal thing for them. It's not a red flag. So they don't even think that they are pregnant. Some women on birth control can also get pregnant and not know because after all, birth control is supposed to help prevent pregnancy. But the thing you need to realize is no birth control is 100% safe. Yes, a lot of them are greater than 99% safe, but you see that 0.something percent is still a percentage. There are also some birth controls, hormonal birth controls, that allows a woman to skip her periods. So when these birth controls fail, the woman will not know because on a normal day, she's skipping her period on the birth control. Some women don't have the typical pregnancy signs and symptoms. That is no cramping, nausea, vomiting, breast tenderness, bloatedness. So she might not know that she's pregnant. If she's having morning sickness, like mild morning sickness, you might just mistake it as a temporary illness, a stomach upset. So she might not know that she's pregnant. Some women might not feel their baby move and this might not make them realize that they're pregnant. Typically, a woman starts to feel her baby move between 18 weeks and 20 weeks of pregnancy. But if the placenta happens to be in front of your uterus, you might not feel the movements. And for some women, they just can't believe it. They can't believe that they're pregnant. Maybe at that time in their lives, they're extremely stressed. They're in a stressful situation and their mind is not processing the pregnancy yet. For some women, it might be a shame, especially in the younger women. Women with cryptic pregnancy are more likely to give birth outside of a hospital because they don't even know that they're pregnant. They don't even know when they're in labor. When they're in labor, they probably think what manner of abdominal pain is this? Then they only realize when the head is already coming out of the vagina. It can be a traumatic experience for a mother. Although the mother did not have any prenatal or antenatal care, the baby may still come out healthy. However, babies from cryptic pregnancies have an increased risk of stillbirth and infant death, that is, death of a baby within the first year of life. These babies are also at increased risk of neglect from the mother because she wasn't prepared to have the baby and she might find a hard time accepting the baby. But research shows that a woman who delivered from cryptic pregnancy can go on to become a good mother, especially if she comes to terms with the fact that she's having a baby. If you found this video informative and you want more content like this, subscribe to my channel, like this video, drop a comment below if you have questions and see you in my next video.