A Weymouth, Massachusetts, woman gave birth to a 10-pound, 2-ounce daughter this week but didn't even know she was pregnant until she arrived at the hospital an hour before the baby arrived.
Katie Kropas told CBS Boston that she woke up Tuesday with "crazy lower back pain" and went to the hospital in South Shore Weymouth.
There, she was shocked to find out she was carrying a full-term baby.
"They told me that I had a full-term baby, ready to come, now. So I found out at 10:15 and I had her at 11:06," Kropas told CBS.
The Patriot Ledger reported that Kropas' boyfriend, Dan O'Keefe, call her parents to tell them their daughter was pregnant, and the grandparents just made it to the hospital in time for their grandbaby’s birth.
Richard Kropas told the Ledger he heard his wife screaming on the phone, and "I almost fell out of the chair."
Such pregnancies, where the mother doesn’t realize she’s pregnant until right before giving birth, are called "cryptic pregnancies," CBS said. Dr. Kim Dever told the news station that out of about 3,500 births every year, they see such a pregnancy "a few times." A British study determined that one in every 2,500 pregnancies happens this way.
Dever told CBS that such pregnancies may occur in overweight women or women who have irregular periods. Oftentimes they don’t feel the baby move very much because of how the placenta is placed.
"Very often, especially in your first pregnancy, you’re really not aware of what you’re feeling and we often have women joke and say they’re feeling gas pains or they can attribute it to other natural conditions," Dever told CBS.
"I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t get my head around it, and I live with her. As a female, there were no signs," Kropas' mother, Karen Kropas, told CBS.
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