The young woman, Keely, said that when she had started gaining weight, she didn’t go the doctor. Unfortunately, she only visited the doctor when she blacked out at work two years later. Confused about the exponential increase in her bump size, she made many visits to the doctor, who was convinced she was pregnant. The repeatedly negative blood tests, however, indicated that the explanation was not this simple. After that, she went for an ultrasound scan, followed immediately by a CT scan, that revealed the frightening truth.
The doctors told Keely that she was not pregnant. The reason behind her oversized belly wasn’t an eight or nine-month-old foetus, but an ovarian cyst weighing 77 lbs. Narrating her experience in a blogpost, she said: “People had seen me waddling around, carrying this lump, and I’d been asked a few times when I was due. It was so embarrassing trying to explain I was – or so I thought – just fat. I’d go along with it to spare everyone’s blushes. I remember trying to shop for clothes and nothing would fit. I was skin and bone on top, then this massive lump and normal legs. The only thing that was going to fit was maternity wear.”
Even though she was petrified, she agreed to the surgery and lost at least a third of her body weight after the removal of the cyst. She told the BBC that the cyst had appeared to grow so slowly at first that that she did not believe anything was wrong. “I’ve been with my partner Jamie for 10 years and we did wonder a few times if I was pregnant – but we did home tests and they always ruled it out,” she said. It was so embarrassing explaining she was not pregnant, she said, that she had decided to go along with well-wishers who asked her about her future date of delivery.
She lost her right 0vary in the surgery but medics have said that her fertility hasn’t been affected by the procedure. But despite having never had kids, she’s been left with one annoying side effect that many mums have to deal with. “At 28 and even though I’ve never been pregnant, I’ve been left with stretch marks.”
