Baby Born In Toilet After Mother Didn't Know She Was Pregnant

Peabody MA

07 April, 2021

6:37 PM

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PEABODY, MA — Melissa Surgecoff thought the bad cramps she was experiencing all morning were from a kidney stone, so she wasn't expecting to give birth to a baby boy. The 38-year-old Peabody, Massachusetts, woman said she didn't even know she had been pregnant when she gave birth on last month. Surgecoff told NBC's "Today" she had an irregular menstrual cycle and thought the weight she gained over the last year was from a combination of staying home because of COVID-19 restrictions and medication for her multiple sclerosis. Surgecoff said she thought the pain she began to feel on the morning of March 8 was a kidney stone. As the day dragged on, the pain began to worsen, and the only way to relieve it was by sitting on the toilet, she told the network. At one point, the pain became so intense she told her fiancé, 37-year-old Donnie Campbell, to call 911. Eventually, she felt something drop out of her and into the toilet bowl. "I look in the toilet and I still didn't know what it was," Surgecoff told "Today." "And I thought I basically lost an organ because I didn't know." Her fiancé went to go investigate the "organ" and realized it was a baby boy. "I started to pick it up very slowly and realized it wasn't breathing at all," Campbell said in an interview with USA Today. Campbell began to wipe up the baby's nostrils and eyes, having remembered something similarly done on a television show he watched, and the boy soon started to breathe. Paramedics arrived to the home and took the un-expectant mother and her newborn son to a local hospital. The couple decided to name the newborn Liam and, despite his unusual birth, doctors said he was completely healthy. Although parenthood wasn't something Surgecoff and Campbell were expecting, they have no regrets with how everything turned out. "Yeah it's amazing now," Surgecoff told NBC Boston. "So I wouldn't change it for anything."