I Had No Idea I Was Pregnant Until A Month Before I Gave Birth

Pavarni Jorgensen may be an accomplished scientist, but even she didn’t suspect the true reason for her stomach pains. 

- Glynis Horning

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: I’m overweight. I’m talking 100kg on the scale. It’s a long story, stretching back to my complicated childhood when I was told I was fat, although old photos show I wasn’t. 

‘I suffered from severe cyclical depression and began to comfort-eat, but at 25 I started cortisone treatment for asthma, and the kilos piled on.This wasn’t helped by the fact that my husband’s a wonderful cook. Adam is of European descent, but prepares the Indian food of my childhood like a pro.

‘Now to the second point: we wanted to have a baby. We ditched birth control in July 2015. We knew it could take up to a year and our approach was that it if happened, it happened. If not, we’d accept it, and continue together “child-free”, focusing on each other, our four rescue dogs (the “furkids”) and our careers. I’m a scientist with a master’s in animal genetics and I work in scientific communications. Adam is a computer programmer.

‘Part of me doubted I’d get pregnant – my periods had been intermittent for some time and, with my weight gain, my gynae had intimated I could be a candidate for early menopause. I did the odd pregnancy test initially, but they were negative each time and I stopped.

‘My mom has Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestines that has a genetic link, and she has irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) as part of that. I suffer from IBS too. So when I felt some discomfort in my tummy in March this year, I put it down to that and some dodgy fish I had eaten.