A woman in Florida got the surprise of her life when what she thought was a bout of bad Chinese food turned out to be a baby.
Crystal Gail Amerson said that she thought she was suffering from food poisoning on early Sunday when she woke up due to excruciating stomach pains, Fox News reports. She chalked it up to her dinner the previous night, saying,
I had Chinese food the night before and I kind of figured maybe I had food poisoning or something like that.
It turned out that the 29-yer-old from Pensacola was very pregnant, and ready to deliver her 37-week-old child.
Amerson said, “The stomach pains were just excruciating and I could hardly move. I think it was about 6:30 [a.m.] when [the ambulance] got there…It escalated so quickly that I was having contractions and we figured out kind of what was going on because at first we really didn’t know what was going on.”
During her first pregnancy, Amerson told the Pensacola News Journal that she did not experience a lot of the symptoms many women have. “I gained a little bit of weight, but I think with my first baby I didn’t notice either,” she said. “I never gained that pregnancy shape, really. And then I wear scrubs to work because I work at a retirement home for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. So I guess the way they fit me as well, it was hard to notice anything or tell anything.”
Dr. Julie DeCesare, an obstetrician-gynecologist with Sacred Heart Hospital, said that while it is possible for a woman to learn that she is pregnant just hours before giving birth, it is unusually rare. DeCesare said, “Sometimes a woman doesn’t have a normal menstrual cycle so they don’t notice when they don’t have a period. Or they use a method of contraceptive so they think they can’t get pregnant, but then that method fails. Or some I’ve seen are just flat out in denial.”
Oliver James, Amerson’s son, was born in the back of an ambulance on their way to the hospital, at 5.27 pounds and 18.9 inches long.
