“I found out I was pregnant 30 minutes before my baby was born”

Ally Opfer was heavily pregnant with her first child and had just finished a busy day at work when she began going into labour. It sounds like the start of a fairly normal birth story, except Ally didn’t know she was pregnant in the first place!

“I woke up the morning of December 21, 2016, feeling absolutely normal, not knowing what I was about to go through,” she writes on Café Mom.

“Just a couple hours later, I started feeling some minor cramping and brushed it off as nothing. It gradually became a little more painful throughout the day so I figured it was that time of the month for me as I had started bleeding a bit too.”

She went to her job as a cheerleading coach and continued on with her day as normal, despite the pain increasing steadily.

“The next morning, December 22, after my mom woke up, I told her I had some horrible cramps and nothing was helping and that I was up all night in pain,” she explains.

She then spent the whole day in bed until her mother came home from work that night. She even took a pregnancy test to rule that out but it came back negative.

With the cramps getting more and more unbearable, Ally decided she needed to go to the hospital, feeling something was very wrong.

After some blood tests and an ultrasound, the doctor had some very surprising news for Ally.

"’Have you ever been pregnant before?’”, he asked. “I of course said ‘No’ very confused. He said, ‘Well, it looks like you’re about 38 weeks pregnant and 10 centimeters dilated. You are in full-blown labor and we need to get you upstairs to labor and delivery now!!!’”

“I went into shock. I was not ready to have a baby. I couldn’t have a baby. My face went white and I started crying and screaming. I. Was. Terrified,” she explains.

While Ally’s baby was perfectly healthy, bub was also breech and Ally had preeclampsia so she was prepped for an emergency c-section.

At 3.31am, Ally’s baby was born. “I lay there crying (happy tears) and was in shock listening to my baby’s cry,” she describes.

On finding out that she’d had a son, Ally was overjoyed as she is from a “family full of girls” and it had been 43 years since a baby boy had been born.

“After everyone woke up, my whole extended family came to the hospital to meet our miracle baby ... all of them just as shocked as we were,” Ally explains.

“Welcome to the world, Oliver David Opfer. My whole family was filled with joy to have this unexpected, magical gift. He’s my parents’ first grandbaby. He’s the most amazing Christmas gift I could ever receive.”