On Feb. 16, 2021, college sophomore Kate Schmittling received the shock of her life when she learned that the excess weight she’d gained during the coronavirus quarantine — as well as the severe menstrual cramps she’d been experiencing — were not coincidental.

Mother-of-one Kate Schmittling, a sophomore at the University of Toledo in Ohio, gave birth to her one-year-old son in February 2021, but she recently opened up in a TikTok video about the unusual circumstances of his birth, recalling her horror at learning she was not only pregnant but also due to give birth in a matter of hours.

The student, now 20, from Michigan, remembers gaining a tiny bit of weight, which she assumed was due to her eating unhealthy foods and skipping the gym due to the pandemic.

She said that she was on the pill and had mild spotting throughout the pregnancy that she mistook for her period, thus she had no idea she was expecting a child.

Kate had similarly been told by her doctor that she couldn’t have a baby, so when she found herself in labor after visiting the emergency hospital on February 16, 2021, she was taken aback.

She went to the hospital because she was having severe cramps and stomach pains, and she came home with a baby son, Sebastian.

‘The doctors in the emergency room were like, “Oh, by the way, you’re going to have a baby right now,”‘ she recalled to the New York Post recently. ‘I was super surprised.

‘[The doctors] said, “You’re in active labor and we need to get you to labor and delivery unit soon.”

She took her to TikTok recently and it quickly went viral – racking up more than 14 million views in just a few days and leaving many people on the internet fascinated with her story. 

‘Me having really bad period cramps and rushing to the ER thinking I’m dying,’ she wrote in the clip, before showing a photo of her son. 

‘It’s super emotional,’ she admitted to the Post. ‘I went from being a normal college student to a mom in one day. I couldn’t believe it.’

‘I was shocked, I can’t explain my emotions because there’s not even an emotion to put there, I don’t even know what to call it,’ she also said on TikTok. 

Kate said she gained some weight near the end of the pregnancy but certainly ‘didn’t look eight months pregnant.’

‘We were in the middle of the pandemic, so any of the weight that I did gain I thought that it was quarantine weight,’ she explained to the Post. ‘I was not eating very healthy and working out at all.’

She claimed on TikTok that she often had ‘stomach problems,’ so she blamed anything she was feeling on that.

She also was later told that her placenta was ‘in front’ of the baby, which is why she didn’t feel him kicking.

‘I was literally bleeding so it didn’t really [occur to] me that I was pregnant,’ she said in another video.

‘I was on birth control. I probably shouldn’t have relied on birth control but I did, but here we are.

‘I didn’t gain a crazy amount of weight as most pregnant people do early on. Any of the weight I did gain, I thought it was quarantine weight because I was literally trapped in my dorm room and did not eat healthy at all.

‘I was on the pill throughout the whole thing. I took it religiously every morning at 10 AM with my breakfast all the time.

‘Clearly, birth control isn’t 100 percent, it doesn’t work all the time. There’s always that little chance you could still get pregnant.’ 

‘You don’t have a period while pregnant, however, 25 percent of pregnant women bleed during their pregnancy,’ she said on TikTok. ‘Plus, I’ve always had irregular periods.’ 

The one sign she did notice was a change in her emotions. 

‘I have emotions now and I had emotions before but definitely during that time, anything would set me off,’ she recalled.

‘I blamed it on being a college student in the middle of a freaking pandemic. I was stressed all the time, but I was definitely over-the-top emotional a lot.’

Her family has been “very supportive,” she said, and her parents “enjoy being grandparents” to Sebastian, who recently celebrated his first birthday.

‘Everyone was super surprised of course but my family and friends are super supportive,’ she explained on TikTok.

She said that she and the father, who is also a 20-year-old student whose name has been kept hidden for privacy reasons, are great at co-parenting.

‘At first, [the] father was definitely shocked and surprised like everyone else,’ she told the Post.

‘However, he and his family are extremely supportive and involved in Sebastian’s life, and we’re both attending school and working part-time to ensure that [Sebastian] continues to thrive.’

‘It was somewhat bizarre,’ she remarked on TikTok when asked how she learned to ‘suddenly have a love for a baby’ who was ‘like a stranger to her. To be honest, I didn’t want to be near him at first and requested that he stay in the nursery with me while I processed my feelings.

‘One of my sweet nurses (who was a teen mom too) told me whatever my choice is, I’m gonna wanna at least see the baby so I did and I’m so glad I did because it honestly made me face reality and process things better. Plus, I fell in love with him instantly.’

Despite calling the situation ‘really scary,’ she said she is now thankful that she went through it.

‘Even though the whole experience was really scary, I was really happy to find out that I can have kids, and that my baby was completely healthy,’ she gushed to the Post. 

She added on TikTok, ‘Sebastian is thriving, and he’s so smart, such a good kid. Love him so much, super blessed.’ 

Source: dailymail.co.uk