Woman Delivers Surprise Baby, Wonders 'How Could We Have Not Known?'

Andrea Curry attributed nine months of discomfort to back pain, not pregnancy.

ByABC News
August 16, 2011, 12:32 PM

Aug. 17, 2011 -- When 31-year-old Andrea Curry put on an extra 10 pounds last year, she attributed it to stress.

"I thought I was just gaining weight because I had been stressed out about a few things," Curry, a busy mother of a toddler-age son, Tyler, told ABC News.

And as Curry continued to menstruate, she figured everything in her body was normal.

"I had my period every month, so nothing shot up as a red flag in my mind," she said. "When I was pregnant with my first son, I found out I was pregnant because I stopped getting my period. I had morning sickness for the seven or eight of the months I was pregnant with him. I definitely felt pregnant."

Even when her mother told her she looked pregnant in the clothes she was wearing, Curry, who lives in Rochester, N.Y., didn't believe it.

"I said, 'Well, if I am, there are some big issues going on because I haven't felt anything that would make me feel like I was pregnant,'" she said. "I said to her, 'Oh, no, I am just getting fat.'"

It was not until one night in October, nine months after her initial weight gain, that Curry learned, the hard way, that her mother had been right.

"My back pain started in here [near her abdomen] when Tyler and I were playing," she recalled of the night she went into labor. "I couldn't sit. I was in so much pain. It was doubling me over at the kitchen counter."

Curry's fiance, Brad, called 911. The operator who answered believed Curry was having a miscarriage.

"I said, 'I don't think I am,'" Curry recalled. "I said that I never had a miscarriage before, and I don't know what it would be like."

Once the paramedics arrived and transported Curry into the waiting ambulance, it was clear that Curry was not having a miscarriage at all. She was giving birth.

"When we were in pursuit to the hospital, the lady in the back was telling me she saw an umbilical cord there," Curry said. "That is when she informed me that I was, in fact, in labor, and that is when it hit me that I was having a baby."