Widow, 43, who gave up on trying to conceive discovered ‘hernia’ was full-term baby

A North Carolina woman gave birth to a full-term baby just hours after discovering she was pregnant.

Erin O’Malley, 43, from Charlotte, had long given up trying to conceive when she went into labor with her daughter Lennox ‘Lenni’ Mae on October 13.

She had always been told she was “destined to be a mother,” despite two miscarriages and the death of her husband in 2010.

‘I really didn’t know [how this happened],” she said to the Charlotte Observer. “I really didn’t know.”

O’Malley had thought she had entered early menopause, like many of the women in her family, and apologized for her sore breasts as a symptom of it. She had also lost weight after diagnosing herself with a stomach hernia that caused her stomach to swell and her belly button to pop after an allergy and asthma-related coughing fit.

But unbeknownst to her, she may have suffered an umbilical hernia, which her mother Karen Mengering and her other sisters all suffered during pregnancy.

“I wasn’t really eating much. I could only eat a little bit at a time because my stomach would bloat,” she told The Observer.

In September she went to a local free medical clinic to get help with her stomach problems as she had no insurance, only to be referred to a gynecologist who then referred her to Novant Health Matthews Medical Center for a CT scan and an ultrasound to test for cancer.

No doctor tested the 43-year-old for pregnancy.

When O’Malley showed up for her follow-up appointment at 11 a.m. on October 12, her sister Amber stayed in the car, thinking the visit wouldn’t be long. She – or O’Malley – didn’t know they were going to be called into the delivery ward.

Instead of pushing a cart through Hobby Lobby as planned, O’Malley would deliver a baby.

The new mother said hospital staff left immediately after taking an exploratory X-ray during her appointment and she was concerned they had found cancerous tumors.

‘I started to fall asleep. Then finally everyone came back in and he said, “Mrs. O’Malley, uh – we found something on your scouting image.” My heart immediately sank,” she told The Observer.

“There’s a baby in there,” her doctor told her.

As O’Malley stared at her doctor in disbelief, long believing she couldn’t get pregnant, she simply told him, “No.”

‘No really. There is real. I can see one. It’s pretty obvious,’ he reassured her.

But she still didn’t believe him and said, ‘No, that’s impossible. It’s impossible. No.’

“I was definitely not trying to hide it in any way. So it’s not like I was trying to keep it a secret so no one knew,” she told The Observer.

Dr. Reynolds agreed that she was “completely unaware.”

She wouldn’t believe Reynolds until she held Lennox “Lenni” Mae in her arms in the early hours of October 13.

“I was arguing with him for about 10, 20 minutes,” she told The Observer. “I literally had to sit there and think, When did I get pregnant? For example, I don’t even remember what was going on in December and January.’

She would later recall that it had been with a man she had been “close to for many years” and who is currently not involved in Lennox’s life.

The doctors did an ultrasound and while the test was going on they “didn’t show me the picture” and O’Malley started to “panic.”

“No one tells me how far along I am. If everything is alright. What’s going on,’ she said.

She was eventually told that the ultrasound showed a full-term baby and that she was in labor.

Lennox was born around 4:30 am, and until she heard her daughter cry, she kept thinking, “This must be a joke.”

After more than a month with her precious newborn, her sister Amber said she is “beyond happy.”

‘We are all. And it’s so special because we lost our sister on October 11 last year; we found out Erin was pregnant on the 12th this year; and she actually had her C-section on the 13th. So it was on the day a year after my sister died when we found out we have this new life in our family. It’s great,” Amber told The Observer.

While O’Malley wouldn’t change a thing, she wished she had “all this time to experience being pregnant” and wished she had known sooner.

As for being a single parent — after her husband died of sickle cell anemia in 2010 and her baby’s father chose to be inactive — she’s not worried about it.

“Maybe something will change. But even if they don’t, I’ve been given the greatest gift he could have ever given me – even if he didn’t mean to,” she told the observer.

‘It won’t be easy. I’m tired… but I don’t care how tired I am. This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. And I couldn’t help but be thankful.’