‘We have to get your baby out now and perform an emergency caesarian,’ the doctors told me. ‘We don’t know where she is.’
I just couldn’t take it in. I was 33 weeks pregnant, and now the doctors were saying they didn’t know where my baby was. Where else could she be but inside my womb.
Before I could ask any more questions, I was given a general anaesthetic and wheeled down to the operating theatre in St Joseph’s Hospital in Ontario, Canada.
When I woke up, doctors had some unbelievable news for me. My baby daughter had survived, but it was nothing short of miracle. For 33 weeks she had been growing outside my womb, in my stomach cavity. Her head had been squashed between my liver and my bowel and her feet were wedged underneath my ribs.
‘Is she alright,’ I asked the doctor anxiously. They told me that she was fine. She had a flattened head where she had been pushed against my liver, and she had two dislocated hips and two club feet, but apart from that she was healthy.
I was so sore from my caesarian operation that I couldn’t move at all. Instead of a neat horizontal line across my bikini line, the doctors had instead had to cut me vertically from my ribs downwards to get her out. This had been no ordinary caesarian.
I was wheeled down to see her later that day. She was lying in an intensive care cot with tubes coming out of her, but I was just so thrilled she was alive.
My partner Todd Miller and I decided to call her Emylea. We had been so thrilled when I had fallen pregnant.
I had met Todd, 41, a carpet factory worker, in June 2004, when I moved from Toronto to London, Ontario, in Canada.
I’d just got fed up with living in such a big city, which was always so noisy and crowded and I decided I wanted to live somewhere quieter.
But when I arrived in Ontario last year, I didn’t know anyone. I had found a suitable flat to rent and was going to have a look at it, but I ended up getting lost.
So I stopped a passerby in the street, whose name was Todd, and asked him directions to the street I was looking for.
He was so nice and helpful. He told me which bus to get onto, and then said he would take me there himself, so he came with me.
When he dropped me off outside the flat we arranged to meet the following week for a coffee, but I got horribly lost again, and ended up not being able to find the cafe. It was stroke of luck two weeks later that I was shopping in the town centre when I bumped into him again on the street. This time we did go for a coffee and started seeing each other from there.
Even though we’d only known each other for a matter of week we knew we were destined to be together and we already started talking about starting a family together in the future. So when I discovered I was pregnant three months later in September 2004, we were both thrilled.
I had missed a period and Todd came with me to the doctor. When he told us I was pregnant, Todd just flung his arms around me. He couldn’t wait to be a dad.
I was only a few weeks pregnant, and three weeks later, I started getting stomach cramps. At first I thought I could be miscarrying as the pains were like bad menstral cramps, but I wasn’t bleeding.
I went to the nearby Victoria Hospital in Ontario and they scanned me and said everything was fine.
But the pain never went away and gradually got more severe. In the next seven weeks I went back to hospital another four times, almost crying with the pain. But each time they scanned me and said they couldn’t find anything wrong. They just sent me home with painkillers. I rang my mum Margaret, who was still living in Toronto. She’s a nurse, but even she said that nothing would be wrong and she thought I just had a low pain tolerance.
Todd was worried about me and he was upset that none of the doctors or nurses seemed to believe me, but what else could I do. If they had scanned the baby and said it was fine, then there was nothing more they could do.
But at nine weeks pregnant, a scan showed that there was no amniotic sac with fluid around the baby.
But she had normal organ development, so they said they would monitor me extremely carefully.
On February 25th, 2005, when I was nearly five months pregnant, the doctors also discovered I was suffering from placenta previa, where the placenta covers part of the cervix.
It could be lifethreatening for me as I could heamorrhage and lifethreatening for the baby too, plus there ws a chance that she could develop severe abnormalities.
So I had to go into hospital that day and stay there until the baby was born.
I was really frightened, but the doctors reassurred me they would monitor her heart rate every day and said she was developing normally, and they would keep a careful watch over me.
Todd came to visit me every day and would reassurre me that everything was going to be alright. I did feel better being in hospital, but I was still suffering from severe abdominal pain, so much so that often I would have to bite back the tears.
The doctors were baffled. They had absolutely no idea what was causing it. They would ask me if it was constant, or came in waves, and I told them that it was constant, that it didn’t let up. As the pregnancy progressed the pain got worse - sometimes it felt as if razors were slicing me up inside. Everytime she moved I was in agony. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what. I just wanted the pregnancy to be over with as quickly as possible and her to be born, as the pain would then stop. Todd was so worried about me being in so much pain too, but we both felt completely helpless.
I was also having problems with constipation, which I later found out was because Emylea was pressing on my bowel. And I also had to be careful what I ate as I was getting very bad acid indigestion.
‘Something has to be wrong, and I’m so scared,’ I said to Todd, when I was 32 weeks pregnant. The pain had become so bad that the doctors had to give me a shot of morphine to kill the pain, which they didn’t want to do in case it harmed the baby.
‘It’s be alright,’ he tried to reassurre me. But I knew he was worried too.
Then at 33 weeks, on April 30th, I was taken in for a scan, and the doctors thought they could see my bowel inside my womb, instead of the baby. They couldn’t see her anymore on the scan.
Complete panic broke out and it was terrifying. All they would say to me was that they had to perform an emergency caesarian immediately to get the baby out as there was something seriously wrong.
I was terrified as I was wheeled down to theatre. They put me out under general anaesthetic and cut me open from my ribs to the bottom of my stomach.
Once they opened me up, they made the unbelieveable discovery that Emylea hadn’t spent the last 33 weeks growing inside my womb.
Instead the fertilized egg had fallen into my stomach cavity, and the placenta had fastened itself on the outside of the uterus, feeding the baby as it grew outside too. Luckily it was larger than average which had helped to support her, and it was also lucky that it had implanted on the side of the uterus. If it had attached to the spleen or liver instead, then they probably would have ruptured.
No wonder I had been feeling so much pain. When they lifted Emylea out, her head was squashed between my bowel and my liver. and her feet were stuck in my ribs. I don’t know why it hadn’t been picked up on the previous scans that she wasn’t actually in the womb.
But on that last scan, she’d moved around so that they could see the empty womb, but she was behind it.
All I could do was just gape open mouthed at the doctors as they told me the terrible details when I came round from the anaesthetic.
I just couldn’t believe I was hearing it. There has only ever been four recorded cases in the world like it, and the doctors themselves couldn’t believe that we had both survived such a pregnancy. It shocked them, just as much as it shocked me.
And they also had some more devastating news for me. ‘I’m afraid we had to remove your uterus,’ one of the doctors genetly told me. ‘It looked like a bomb had gone off inside your stomach and the uterus had been so badly damaged, we had to take it out. You won’t be able to have any more children.’
I was upset when I heard that. All my life, I’ve wanted to be a mother and I always imagined that I would have a large family.
Now Emylea will be an only child, but I feel so blessed to have her, that it doesn’t matter that I won’t be able to have any more.
If the doctors had discovered it earlier, they would have terminated the pregnancy immediately, which I wouldn’t have wanted. So I’m glad they didn’t discover it until they lifted her out - otherwise she wouldn’t be hear with me today.
I stayed in hospital for two weeks recovering from the operation, but Emylea had to stay in for nearly three months as she had to have a feeding tube and her lungs hadn’t developed fully.
I just kept sitting with her, staring at her in wonderment, that she had survived through it all. It was an emotional moment when Todd and I brought her home in June for the first time.
She is such a good baby now, and hardly ever cries. She has had three plaster casts on her left foot to straighten it out and will need another one in a few weeks time. Her right foot is likely to correct itself.
Her left hip will also correct itself, but her right one will need surgery to reset it in a few months time, and they she will have to have a plaster cast from her hip down to her toes for three months whilst it resets.
It’s upsetting to see her in plaster casts, but she is too young to remember it in the future, and we feel very lucky that after all she’s been through, thats all she has had wrong with her. I truly feel like the luckiest mother in the world.’
Lia Tharby, 28, from London, Ontario.