Lyndsay Lowery, 32, had been losing weight for a few months, dropping from a size 18 to 14 after following a Weight Watchers diet.
She and fiancé Adam Hourton, 32, were enjoying a lineup of foreign holidays and going on the world’s biggest roller coasters.
On May 10, 2015, she went to work as normal and then to her mother’s house in Colwick, England, for dinner. “We watched the soaps and I went to bed about 9 p.m.,” she said.
She didn’t sleep long though.
“I woke up about 10.30 p.m. with a strange stomach pain, I tried to go back to sleep, but was unable to do so,” she said.
“I started moving around and my mum went upstairs to check me.
“I was curled on the floor in the fetal position.”
Lyndsay’s mother called an ambulance, but was told to get into a hospital on her own, since she was still responsive.
“One panicked taxi ride later we get to hospital and I keeled over,” Lyndsay said. “I went straight to the front of the queue because they thought it might be my appendix.”
It wasn’t.
Very quickly the hospital staff diagnosed that Lyndsay was actually having contractions. In fact, she was already over two inches dilated.
“It all happened really quickly after that,” she said. “We rang Adam and told him to get to the hospital.”
Three hours later, Lyndsay gave birth to an 8-pound 3-ounce baby girl—Isabella.
“Adam was slightly in denial in the delivery room, even with the sensor on my stomach and the heartbeat,” Lyndsay said.
“I just said, ‘I would know if I was pregnant.’”
But she didn’t.
“The [medical staff] said she [Isabella] was hiding in the back,” Lyndsay said.
Throughout the pregnancy, the couple just went about their days, oblivious.
“We had been carrying on our lives [as] we normally would which meant going to as many gigs as possible and going on holiday,” Adam said.
“We went to Florida, went on all the rollercoasters, we went to Salou and went on all the rollercoasters.”
A week before the birth, they even went to a high ropes abseiling day at the local water sports centre.
“Lyndsay lost her footing and was hanging over nothing with the harness kicking in,” Adam said. “Little did we know she had a full-term baby in her stomach.”
Now that Isabella is three, Adam has written a book about the couple’s experiences, called “Three Hour Dad.”
“Not to know somebody is living inside you is surreal,” Lyndsay said.
