A Fitness Routine Helped Explain a Lump—Until Sammy Evans Learned She Was About to Give Birth
When Sammy Evans noticed a lump near her ribs, she blamed her workout routine. She had recently started doing more abdominal exercises and assumed the strange shape was connected.
Within 24 hours, the 41-year-old discovered she was pregnant—and gave birth to a baby she had no idea was coming.
Evans appeared on ITV’s This Morning with her partner, Triston, and their newborn son, Noah, to share what happened. The couple already had children from previous relationships: Evans has a 10-year-old, and Triston has a 16-year-old. They had not planned to have another baby.
Before the hospital visit, Evans had been feeling unusually “heavy,” “dry” and “a bit odd” in her lower abdomen. She arranged a cervical screening test to rule out a serious problem, but the results came back clear.
The symptoms continued, so she returned to her doctor.
“It carried on a bit longer, and I thought, enough’s enough; I need to go and get it looked at,” Evans recalled. “I explained the symptoms to the doctor, and she said, ‘Let’s do some tests; let’s see what it is, it could be a UTI.’”
Evans also told her doctor that she had not had a period in a long time. She did not consider that unusual because she had lost a significant amount of weight—around 10 stone—and thought it might explain the change in her cycle.
The lump near her ribs also seemed to have a straightforward explanation. Evans described it as long, “a bit like a fat tire,” rather than the rounded shape she associated with a pregnancy bump. She had recently started working with a new personal trainer and was doing more core exercises.
“When I got a new PT, I was doing a lot of ab work, and I thought, ‘Oh gosh, why did I do this? It looks even worse than it did before,’” she said.
At a later appointment, Evans took tests for a urinary tract infection and pregnancy. The UTI test came back positive. The pregnancy test was also faintly positive, but the line was difficult to see.
Evans said doctors told her that if she were as far along as the dates suggested, the result should have been much clearer—“glowing,” as she remembered them describing it.
She went home, started antibiotics for the infection and carried on with her usual routine. She even attended her water-aerobics class. But that night, stomach pain woke her. She assumed it was period pain.
Her father drove her to the hospital, where doctors confirmed that she was pregnant. Even then, Evans thought she might have months to go before giving birth. The pain soon intensified, and she learned she was already in labor.
Noah arrived shortly afterward.
Evans said that after the birth, she was still in considerable pain and had stitches to recover from. “I was like, ‘Oh gosh, I’ve had a baby,’ but I’m still in horrendous pain, so I didn’t get a chance immediately to be like, ‘Oh, I’ve had a baby,’” she recalled.
Friends and family were stunned by the news and have struggled to understand how she could have been unaware of the pregnancy. With Noah already home, her friends are now organizing a baby shower to celebrate his arrival.
The experience is known as a cryptic pregnancy: when someone does not realize they are pregnant, sometimes until labor begins. Dr. Sara Kaya, who discussed the subject on This Morning, said it can happen even when a person has no obvious symptoms.
“It’s an unusual thing, but it does happen, and some people just get no symptoms at all,” Kaya explained.
She added that body shape, strong abdominal muscles and the way the pelvis tilts can affect how visible a pregnancy bump becomes.
For Evans and Triston, the news left almost no time to prepare. One day, she was trying to explain a lump she blamed on exercise. The next, the couple were bringing home a newborn son they never expected.
