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A British backpacker traveling around Australia got the shock of her life when she caught a “stomach bug” – and ended up delivering a roughly 6.4 pound baby girl.
Hattie Sheppard, 21, had been on a six-month adventure with her boyfriend Bailey Cheadle, 22, on the east coast where the couple had enjoyed wild beach parties and boozy boat trips.
But in July last year, Sheppard started to feel unwell, initially putting her stomach cramps down to an unpleasant stomach bug.
After taking two paracetamol tablets, her symptoms worsened, turning into an intense pain on the right side of her stomach, prompting the university student to suspect appendicitis and head straight to Gold Coast University Hospital in Queensland.
There, doctors performed an ultrasound and discovered the real cause of her sudden and agonizing cramps: she was in labor.
“I remember turning and looking at the doctor’s face when he was doing the ultrasound, and he just had the most confused face I’ve ever seen,” she said.
“I asked him what was wrong, and he said there’s a baby. I thought this was impossible as I’m on the pill.
“And he said, ‘no there’s a baby coming now, and you’re in labor’.”
Sheppard said she “didn’t believe him at first,” describing the situation as the “most sickening and frightening thing I’ve ever experienced in my whole life”.
Despite the shock, the young woman – who was a size 6 and had no pregnancy symptoms – gave birth to a little girl named Isla-Grace Cheadle just 10 hours later.
She’s since discovered that the reason she had no idea she was pregnant is because her placenta was pushed up to the front of her stomach, which stopped her feeling any of the baby’s movement.
Isla-Grace was also growing at the back near her spine, which is why the shocked mom-to-be didn’t have a bump, The Sun reports.
While it might sound impossible to go nine months and be completely unaware that you are pregnant, the phenomenon is surprisingly more common than you’d think.
In Australia, it is estimated that approximately 1 in 475 pregnancies are cryptic, meaning the pregnancy is not discovered until after 20 weeks of gestation.
For cases where the pregnancy remains unknown until the very moment of labor or birth, the incidence is estimated to be roughly 1 in 2500.
Considering approximately 5800 to 5900 babies are born every week in Australia, it means while cryptic pregnancies are classed as rare pregnancies, they occur around twice a week.
In Sheppard’s case, she also has Graves’ disease, an auto-immune disorder where the immune system attacks the thyroid gland – also known as hyperthyroidism – that can cause dizziness, weight loss, and fatigue.
In some cases, it can also make it more difficult to conceive.
“With my Graves’ disease, it’s a struggle to put on weight, so I had actually had my [medication] dosage increased, and I thought it was working,” Sheppard explained, noting she’d had gained a small amount of weight before Isla-Grace was born.
“I used to be quite underweight, but I had got back into eating healthy and going to the gym, so I was actively trying to put on weight.
“So the weight gain I had, I thought was intentional.”
Entirely unaware that she was expecting, Sheppard’s life had been full of adventure, with the young woman admitting “I’m a little bit of an adrenaline junkie”.
Just a few months before going into labour, she had gone on a slingshot ride in Surfers Paradise with Mr Cheadle, recalling how the ride “shoots you up into the air at 100mph (160 km/h) and takes you all over”.
She added: “Me and Bailey rented a boat out for my 21st birthday in September. We were jumping off the boat into the water, drinking and it was a standard 21st birthday. Exactly two weeks before she was born, it was New Year’s Eve. My boyfriend and I were on the beach watching fireworks, and we’d been out before that.”
Photos from December 31 show Sheppard wearing a pair of figure-hugging shorts and a black lace top – with no visible ‘baby bump’.
The young parents are now preparing to head back to their home in Doncaster, approximately 234 kilometers northwest of London, admitting they are bringing back much more than memories from their gap year in Australia.
“I honestly could not be happier,” Sheppard said.
“It’s the strangest thing that could have happened, but it feels normal.”
