I hope 'brailsafe (whose jokey (and IMHO, low-effort) comment was heavily downvoted then flagged into oblivion) takes note -- this is a good example of a funny that this community appreciates.
A pregnancy doesn't show up on a pregnancy test (a read operation) until after implantation and enough fetal growth to significantly impact the mother's hormone levels. So, there was a write (fertilization) followed by a read (pregnancy test) without any synchronizing operation. The pre-op pregnancy test missed the pregnancy because of the race between the read and the write.
I think I read that entire post in one breath. That was an emotional train that fortunately had a good ending. May the child live a long and happy life.
Wow I am not too religious a person but after reading this I have to say...when God (or some higher force) is with you, miracles likes this can happen.
It sounds like you are comparatively very religious compared to me. Rare events happen with a certain probability. What happened here was not impossible by any known law of biology or physics or whatever.
A standard urine-based pregnancy test turns positive ~10-12 days after conception. So the embryo must’ve been even younger. Probably 3-6 days.
Conception happens in the Fallopian tube, it takes 2-3 days for the fertilized egg to reach the uterus for nidation.
From a hormonal level, a pregnancy is undetectable, because literally nothing happens in the woman’s body at first. The increase in progesterone happens after every ovulation. The embryo isn’t connected to the mothers blood stream yet. And you can’t see on an ultra sonic scan whether the egg is fertilized or not.
It was undetectable at the time of the surgery to remove the ovaries and Fallopian tubes.
At the time of the surgery, the embryo was young enough to not be detected but old enough to be out of the Fallopian tubes and not depend on the ovaries’ hormones anymore.
Older than one week, but younger than three. A two-week window.
And after that surgery, I could understand not suspecting pregnancy for abdominal swelling.
As a recent medical school graduate and a technical founder of a medical education startup, wow. This is an "edge case" for lack of a better phrase and is the kind of stuff that becomes widespread as lore or an interesting story - at least I'd like to think so.
Thanks for sharing your story and I wish you the best with what's next.
This is an interesting thought to entertain, but it sounds like sampling bias [0]. It's less remarkable if a doctor tells a patient that she can't get pregnant, and she doesn't.
Some fertility specialists will say on first consult, the odds that you could get pregnant naturally just went down as you walked through the door to my office.
All because the kind of people who visit a fertility specialist have lower fertility stats than the kind of people who don't (duh). The average practitioner doesn't really excel at distinguishing between correlation and causation.
Yes. I found it interesting that fertility specialists are actually quite focused on statistics. It's because in majority of infertility cases there is either no explanation at all, or no absolute blockers to pregnancy, just less chances. The entire field is in big part focused on how to improve patient's chances in this dice roll.
It's very important for people particularly women to test for BRCA. Men with the gene should alert female relatives.
For those women that have the gene there are non surgical options today to prevent some of these cancers.
My Dad died after a long and difficult fight with prostate cancer that advanced to untreatable Stage 4 very quickly because of an underlying BRCA2 mutation. I'm so thankful the NHS tested him for this, and then tested my brother and I (both positive), and then sponsored IVF for my brother to concieve his first child with screening for BRCA2 mutation.
He now has a five month old baby girl who doesn't have the same coinflip requirement that BRCA2 brings girls of almost-guaranteed servere breast cancer and invasive life-changing surgery to reduce risk, and my brother and I both get MRIs at 40 and regular screening for when we (very likely) get prostate cancer.
This article was such a surprise to see at the top of HN, and I urge everyone to share it as both a lovely good news story and awareness of how underlying genes can cause aggressive cancers.
It's a joke - the public health services in places like Canada and the UK have a (mostly unfair) reputation for never getting anything done in a timely manner.
It's almost as if there are entire lobbies that pour tons of money into PR efforts to promote those falsehoods and tarnish the reputations of those public services in order to shift public sentiment towards their privatisation!
Breathtaking! Somehow, the one upvote I'm allowed to give didn't seem enough. I read loads of "cold reality" stories every morning ( I check WSJ, NYT and Bloomberg once in the morning ) and perhaps due to this conditioning, I was expecting something depressing. But this made my day.
“Life found a way out” would’ve been a nice title for this. :)
Edit: seriously, this is a fascinating account of how unexpected some life events can be, and then turn out to bring happiness that was sought but wasn’t expected.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadhttps://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/372193v1
I cannot imagine how excited their mother-in-law was to be there for the birth of her grandchild.
That said, congratulations for the best outcome.
edit: wait sry - it also says 2 weeks, so now I dont know how to read what its saying
Conception happens in the Fallopian tube, it takes 2-3 days for the fertilized egg to reach the uterus for nidation.
From a hormonal level, a pregnancy is undetectable, because literally nothing happens in the woman’s body at first. The increase in progesterone happens after every ovulation. The embryo isn’t connected to the mothers blood stream yet. And you can’t see on an ultra sonic scan whether the egg is fertilized or not.
What a crazy story.
At the time of the surgery, the embryo was young enough to not be detected but old enough to be out of the Fallopian tubes and not depend on the ovaries’ hormones anymore.
Older than one week, but younger than three. A two-week window.
And after that surgery, I could understand not suspecting pregnancy for abdominal swelling.
Thanks for sharing your story and I wish you the best with what's next.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
The onion headline
All because the kind of people who visit a fertility specialist have lower fertility stats than the kind of people who don't (duh). The average practitioner doesn't really excel at distinguishing between correlation and causation.
Highly recommend this documentary from PBS on the topic as well: https://inheritance-brcafilm.com/pbs-documentary
He now has a five month old baby girl who doesn't have the same coinflip requirement that BRCA2 brings girls of almost-guaranteed servere breast cancer and invasive life-changing surgery to reduce risk, and my brother and I both get MRIs at 40 and regular screening for when we (very likely) get prostate cancer.
This article was such a surprise to see at the top of HN, and I urge everyone to share it as both a lovely good news story and awareness of how underlying genes can cause aggressive cancers.
What would have changed about the pregnancy if it wasn't earlier than planned?
Edit: seriously, this is a fascinating account of how unexpected some life events can be, and then turn out to bring happiness that was sought but wasn’t expected.