NANAIMO — Josephine Anglin went to the emergency room Monday night with severe back pain and expects to go home Saturday with a baby.
Anglin, 20, gave birth just before 5 a.m. Tuesday to a baby girl she didn’t know she was carrying.
The Nanaimo resident and her fiancé, Jonathan Phillips, 19, were shocked when doctors informed them Monday night at 10:30 that she was pregnant.
“We kind of looked at each other and were dumbfounded,” Anglin said.
Emergency room doctors gave Anglin a muscle relaxant to treat the back pain. She was asked to provide a urine sample, which gave a positive result for pregnancy. Emergency room doctors performed an ultrasound and discovered the baby was at full term and that Anglin was dilating.
Anglin gave birth to an eight-pound, 14-ounce daughter named Nevaeh (heaven spelled backward). Born with some fluid in her lungs, Nevaeh was put on an IV and antibiotics.
On Friday, the baby was breathing well and feeding, and Anglin was told they should be able to leave hospital Saturday.
Anglin’s mother, Diana, thought it was a joke when she got a call from her daughter saying that she was going to have a baby and that Diana should get to the hospital quickly.
The phone conversation went back and forth between the two women for about five minutes until Diana decided to call her daughter’s bluff, expecting her to call off the prank.
“I got dressed and started driving to the hospital and thought, ‘She’s serious. She didn’t tell me not to come,’ ” Diana said.
Neither Anglin nor anyone close to her suspected she was pregnant, save for Diana, who recalled one instance a few weeks ago when she had noticed something different.
“I just jokingly said, ‘You look pregnant.’ She said, ‘Well, I’m not,’ ” Diana recalled.
Anglin, who works as a cashier at a hardware store, said she had not experienced morning sickness or food cravings and never felt the baby kicking.
She gained some weight, but she attributed that to junk food and the fact that her fiancé, a chef, was cooking more.
Although Anglin said she had not had her period since about January, she had missed menstrual cycles before during times of stress. Given work and school commitments, plus moving in with her fiancé, she said she had not given the biological signs much thought.
“I had no cravings. I ate normally, I wore the same clothes that I always wear,” she said.
The new mother is ecstatic, adding she and Phillips intended to start a family.
“We definitely planned on it, we just didn’t expect it.”
Diana gives the new mom high marks.
“She’s actually a natural, like she was meant to be a mother,” she said.
She’s also thrilled to have a grandchild. “She’s an angel. She’s just unbelievable.”
