Woman, 43, who gave up on trying to conceive discovered ‘hernia’ was full-term baby

A North Carolina woman gave birth to a full-term baby just hours after finding out she was pregnant. 

Erin O’Malley, 43, of Charlotte, had long since given up on becoming pregnant, despite always hearing that she was ‘meant to be a mom,’ after suffering two miscarriages and losing her husband in 2010. 

‘I really didn’t know [how this happened],’ she told the Charlotte Observer. ‘I really didn’t know.’ 

O’Malley had thought she had gone into early menopause, like many of the women of her family, and excused her sore breasts as a symptom of it. She had also lost weight after self-diagnosing herself with a stomach hernia that would make her stomach swell and her bellybutton pop after suffering an allergy and asthma-related coughing fit. 

However, unbeknownst to her, she may have been suffering an umbilical hernia, which her mother Karen Mengering and her other sisters all suffered from while pregnant. 

Erin O’Malley, 43, of Charlotte, had long since given up on becoming pregnant despite always hearing that she was ‘meant to be a mom’ after suffering two miscarriages and losing her husband in 2010

On October 13, she gave birth to her daughter Lennox ‘Lenni’ Mae after unknowingly being pregnant for nine months 

‘I wasn’t really eating very much. I could only eat just a little bit at a time, because my stomach would swell,’ she told the Observer. 

By September, she went to a local free medical clinic to get help with her stomach issues, as she didn’t have insurance, only to be referred to a gynecologist who then referred her to Novant Health Matthews Medical Center for a CT scan and an ultrasound to test for cancer. 

No doctor tested the 43-year-old for pregnancy.  

When O’Malley showed up on October 12 for her follow-up appointment at 11am, her sister Amber stayed in the car, thinking the visit wouldn’t last long. Little did she – or O’Malley – know that they’d be called up to the labor and delivery ward. 

Instead of pushing a cart through Hobby Lobby, like they planned, O’Malley would be delivering a baby. 

The new mom said hospital staff immediately left after taking a scouting image during her appointment and she worried they had found cancerous tumors. 

‘I started to fall asleep. Then finally everybody came back in and he’s like: “Ms. O’Malley, um – we found something on your scouting image.” Immediately, my heart sunk,’ she told the Observer. 

‘There’s a baby in there,’ her doctor told her. 

As O’Malley stared at her doctor in disbelief, having long believed she couldn’t get pregnant, she simply told him: ‘No.’

‘No, really. There really is. I can see one. It’s pretty clear,’ he reassured her. 

But she still didn’t believe him, saying: ‘No, it’s impossible. It’s impossible. No.’ 

‘I definitely was not trying to hide it in any kind of way. So it’s not like I was trying to keep it a secret so nobody knew,’ she told the Observer. 

Dr. Reynolds agreed that she was ‘completely oblivious.’  

O’Malley had thought she had gone into early menopause, like many of the women of her family, and excused her sore breasts as a symptom of it. She had also lost weight after self-diagnosing herself with a stomach hernia that would make her stomach swell and her bellybutton pop after suffering an allergy and asthma-related coughing fit

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She wouldn’t actually believe Reynolds until she was holding Lennox ‘Lenni’ Mae in her arms in the early hours of October 13.

‘I was arguing with him for like a good 10, 20 minutes,’ she told the Observer. ‘I had to literally sit there and think, I conceived when? Like, I don’t even remember what was going on in December and January.’ 

She would later remember it had been with a man she had been ‘very close to for years,’ and who is currently not involved in Lennox’s life. 

The doctors performed an ultrasound and while the test was happening, they ‘weren’t showing me the picture’ and O’Malley began ‘freaking out.’ 

‘Nobody’s telling me how far along I am. If everything’s OK. What’s going on,’ she said. 

She was eventually told the ultrasound showed a full-term baby and that she was in labor. 

Lennox was born around 4.30am in the morning and until the very moment she heard her daughter cry, she kept thinking: ‘This has gotta be a joke.’ 

After more than a month with her precious newborn, her sister Amber said she is ‘beyond happy.’ 

The baby’s father is not active in Lennox’s life, but O’Malley is ‘grateful’ to him for the gift he gave her. She also said she and the father were ‘very close’ 

The new mom said she is ‘tired, but I don’t care how tired I am. This is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me’ 

‘We all are. And it’s so special because we lost our sister last year on October 11th; we found out Erin was pregnant this year on the 12th; and she actually had her C-section on the 13th. So it was one year to the day after my sister died when we found we have this new life in our family. It’s wonderful,’ Amber told the Observer. 

Although O’Malley wouldn’t change a thing, she does wish she had ‘all that time to experience being pregnant’ and wished she had known sooner. 

As for being a single parent – after her husband died in 2010 from sickle-cell anemia and her baby’s father choosing to be inactive – she’s not worried about it. 

‘Maybe things will change. But even if they don’t, I have been given the greatest gift he could have ever possibly given me — even if he didn’t intend it,’ she told the Observer. 

‘It’s not gonna be easy. I’m tired…but I don’t care how tired I am. This is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me. And I couldn’t be anything but grateful.’