College sophomore Kate Schmittling got the shock of her life on Feb. 16, 2021, when she discovered that the extra weight she’d gained during the coronavirus quarantine — along with extreme menstrual cramps she’d been enduring — were not mere flukes.
They were signs she was getting ready to give birth.
“I was super surprised when the doctors in the emergency room were like, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re going to have a baby right now,’ ” Schmittling, 20, told The Post.
The University of Toledo student and Michigan native, who was 19 years old at the time, rushed to a local hospital with intense stomach pains from what she’d assumed were the adverse effects of her chronically irregular periods.
“[The doctors] said, ‘You’re in active labor and we need to get you to labor and delivery unit soon,’” Schmittling recalled, remembering the tsunami wave of emotions she experienced upon learning she was one in 475 women to experience a cryptic pregnancy. The condition is a rare gestational occurrence in which conventional medical testing fails to detect a fetus.
Kate Schmittling said she’d experienced what she thought was period bleeding throughout gestation. @kateschmittling/ TikTok“I was in complete shock,” Schmittling said, noting that, at the time, she was “religiously” taking birth control pills every morning.
“It’s super emotional,” she added. “I went from being a normal college student to a mom in one day. I couldn’t believe it.”
And her astonishment was echoed by the more than 13.7 million TikTok viewers who were virtually shaken by her now-viral pregnancy reveal video.
“The way I gasped!” exclaimed one commenter beneath Schmittling’s bombshell baby post.
The clip begins with a shot of her laying on a bed alongside superimposed closed captions reading: “Me having [really] bad period cramps and rushing to the [emergency room] thinking I’m dying.” And the video ends with a transition to a picture of her then-newborn son, Sebastian, who celebrated his first birthday last month.
However, beyond the initial jolt, her online audience questioned how Schmittling — who told TikTok viewers she “didn’t gain a crazy amount of weight” — failed to realize that she was expecting a child for the entirety of her nine-month pregnancy.
“We were in the middle of the pandemic, so any of the weight that I did gain I thought that it was quarantine weight. I was not eating very healthy and working out at all,” she told The Post. The new mom also explained her bulge blunder to her digital fan base in a series of TikTok clips.
And when it came to her monthly menstruation — a cycle that, for Schmittling, had been inconsistent since she’d hit puberty — she said she’d experienced what she thought was period bleeding throughout gestation.
“The bleeding [during my pregnancy] seemed like one of my periods,” she continued. “And my gynecologist had previously told me that I was infertile. So, I didn’t even think I could have kids.”
But after being catapulted from the ER to the delivery room — suffering in labor for two hours and pushing out a baby for 20 minutes — Schmittling’s fears about missing out on motherhood faded away completely.
“Even though the whole experience was really scary, I was really happy to find out that I can have kids, and that my baby was completely healthy,” she said as Sebastian laughed in the background during her interview with The Post.
Her family loaded her up with baby supplies like clothes, nursery, and diapering essentials and an antique cradle that’s been passed down throughout the generations of their bloodline.
And despite being unwittingly hurled into parenthood, Schmittling says she and Sebastian’s father — who is also a 20-year-old college student whom she chose to not name for privacy purposes — are co-parenting harmoniously.
“At first, [the] father was definitely shocked and surprised like everyone else,” she said. “But he and his family are super supportive and involved in Sebastian’s life, and we’re both going to school and working part time to make sure [Sebastian] continues thriving.”
And she advises any young woman worried that they might be experiencing a cryptic pregnancy too: “Get close with your gynecologist and learn everything you can about your body.”
