A Florida woman had no clue she was 37 weeks pregnant, and instead thought her labor pains had a culinary cause — a tainted batch of General Tso’s chicken, according to a report.
Crystal Gail Amerson of Pensacola, said she woke up early Sunday with a severe stomach ache that had her repeatedly running to the bathroom, The Pensacola News Journal reported.
“I had Chinese food the night before and I kind of figured maybe I had food poisoning or something like that,” Amerson, 29, said.
But before long, she learned that she was about to give birth to her second son, the paper reported.
She called out of work, woke her fiance, Brian Westerfield — and as the pain intensified, she decided she needed an ambulance.
“The stomach pains were just excruciating and I could hardly move,” Amerson told the paper. “I think it was about 6:30 a.m. when [the ambulance] got there. … It escalated so quickly that I was having contractions, and we figured out kind of what was going on because at first we really didn’t know what was going on.”
Her son, Oliver James, was born about a half-hour later in the back of the ambulance.
Amerson said she’d never been one to feel the symptoms associated with pregnancy, such as morning sickness and weight gain.
“I gained a little bit of weight, but I think with my first baby I didn’t notice either,” she told the paper. “I never gained that pregnancy shape, really. And then I wear scrubs to work because I work at a retirement home for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. So I guess the way they fit me as well, it was hard to notice anything or tell anything.”
Dr. Julie DeCesare, an obstetrician-gynecologist with Sacred Heart Hospital, told the paper it is possible for a woman to learn of her pregnancy just hours before going into labor — but she’s only seen three such cases in her 20 years of practice.
“Sometimes a woman doesn’t have a normal menstrual cycle so they don’t notice when they don’t have a period,” DeCesare said. “Or they use a method of contraceptive so they think they can’t get pregnant, but then that method fails. Or some I’ve seen are just flat out in denial.”
Even though there was nothing wrong with Amerson’s General Tso’s chicken, she said she still plans on laying off the Chinese food for a while.
“That’s what I was telling my mother-in-law, I think I’m traumatized from Chinese food,” she told the paper. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at it the same way again.”



