I just read the most incredible story; I can’t believe it’s true. Apparently a few years ago, at the Cape Fear Valley Medical Center in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a women came into the hospital asking for a cesarean section. The doctors unsuccessfully attempted to induce labor. They then unsuccessfully tried to do a cesarean. That is, the cesarean would have been successful if the women was actually pregnant. You’re probably thinking this is an April Fools joke, but I assure you, it is not.http://blogs.families.com/admin/b2edit.php?blog=31
The woman in question was suffering from a condition called pseudocyesis, a disorder, which I’ve written about before. Patients who have this condition genuinely believe they are pregnant and are able to convince others as well. They may even exhibit a “baby belly” and produce a positive result on a pregnancy test. (The mind is a powerful thing!) The resident diagnosed the woman with pregnancy, obviously without doing a thorough check, and two doctors proceeded with the induction and cesarean without checking the resident’s diagnosis.
What is most amazing about this story is probably clear to anyone who has ever actually had a baby. First of all, what about the fetal heart beat and contraction monitors they always strap to your belly when you first arrive at the hospital? Besides the initial exam, I thought electronic fetal monitoring was required for induction. If they had used the monitors, they would not have picked up a sound, so they would have likely had to use an ultrasound to check the baby. That would have very quickly alerted the doctors that there was no baby. Second of all, wouldn’t a doctor or nurse have checked her for cervical dilation during the induction process and then noticed she was not pregnant at that time? There are so many questions that come to mind when thinking about this scenario.
In the doctor’s defense, the resident made a huge mistake that most doctors would not expect or encounter in most cases. Pregnancy is not exactly difficult to detect or confirm. It also has to be assumed that the woman looked very pregnant. Can you imagine the doctor’s surprise, though, when she opened up the patient and discovered there was no pregnancy? She was probably almost as surprised as the doctor who found Octomom’s eighth baby at the end of her cesarean. Woops!