There is a TV show on the Discovery Health Channel called “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.”
I have never seen the show—well, not all the way through—though my wife watches it all the time. I have caught glimpses of it as I pass through the living room on my way from my coffee cup to the bathroom, and sometimes I have stood a while to catch the gist of this episode or that one.
And the gist is always pretty much the same:
Here is a perfectly believable young lady, adamant that she used her birth control as instructed, with a perfectly unbelievable tale about how she discovered she was pregnant.
Now, these perfectly believable young ladies don’t find out about their pregnancy in the way that most perfectly believable young ladies find out. They don’t make an appointment with their doctor a month or so after they notice some pretty dramatic changes taking place in their lives. It’s not morning sickness, or weight gain, or swelling breasts, or disrupted monthly cycles that send them to a doctor who delivers the news that makes them say, “Gee, I didn’t know I was pregnant. Seven more months to go, you say?”
No, that’s not how this show goes.
These perfectly believable young ladies find themselves suddenly gushing amniotic fluids while driving to work, or screaming through stomach cramps as an ER doctor says, “You’re fully dilated!”
And they all say—every one of them—“How could I be having a baby? I didn’t know I was pregnant!”
And it’s not just one perfectly believable young lady telling this tale from page 362 of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. No, this is the Discovery Health Channel, which has run this show regularly for four seasons—a total of 58 episodes of perfectly believable young ladies getting the unbelievable surprise of their life.
For the record, I have never been pregnant, but I have spent plenty of time around plenty of ladies who were in that condition, including my mother, wife, sister, and daughter, and even the wives of most of my friends. Not to mention all those other random pregnant ladies who bump into you—and everything else—at the grocery store.
And it seems to me that being pregnant would score somewhere in the top three things that you would know was happening to you. Right up there with being on fire or waking up at the bottom of the sea.
I nearly drowned once in Wisconsin’s Lake Nicaboyne when I was about 10, and even at that tender young age I had a good idea that I was in the middle of a situation that needed to be addressed right away.
Another time at a college party my sweatshirt caught fire, and although I’m a bit fuzzy on the pre-combustion details, I can tell you that it didn’t take nine months for me to yank off my shirt. And that was with a central nervous system that was seriously anesthetized at the time.
So that’s why I find it so shocking that we can watch four seasons of perfectly believable young ladies looking at the camera and saying, “I didn’t know I was pregnant. Not until the baby came along and told me.”
I find it shocking because not one of those pregnant mothers, wives, sisters or daughters in my own life suddenly found a baby at her breast and said, “Wow, who knew this was going to happen when I woke up this morning?”
Even assuming that it is possible for a pregnant woman to miss the signals in her body hinting of things to come, anybody within groaning distance of a pregnant woman would have to have seen some clues, including—but not limited to—impassioned pleas for foot rubs, back rubs, and late-night forays to the 24-hour Kwik-E-Mart to pick up some god-awful culinary combination that would turn a raccoon vegan.
But no. Not with these 58 perfectly believable young ladies.
“I didn’t know I was pregnant,” they all said. Not a clue. Right up to the end.
I know what you’re thinking. Maybe these ladies were so heavy to begin with they didn’t notice the inevitable weight gain that comes with a pregnancy. A normal woman might gain about 30 pounds before delivery, but a heavy woman might gain even less. A 300-pound woman might gain only about five percent of her body weight during pregnancy—a feat I can match on a good night with Rosati’s pizza.
But none of these perfectly believable young ladies on the show—or the actresses portraying them during the real-life dramatizations—seem to tip the scales anywhere near that far.
No, they are all normal-sized ladies going through the perfectly abnormal experience of giving birth to a baby they didn’t have a clue was lurking beneath their Spanx.
Huh.
As I said, I’m pretty mystified by the whole thing, because I have never watched an entire episode all the way through. Only enough to catch the drift as I passed by on my way from coffee to toilet, never pausing so long that I had to glance down at the spreading stain on the front of my pants and mutter, “Well, who knew that was going to happen?”
Now that would be a story worth telling.
Watch for it on the Discovery Health Channel.
