A Georgia woman who mistook labor pains for a bad belly ache was stunned when she went to the bathroom and popped out a bouncing baby boy, she told The Post.
“I looked down in the toilet, and he is in there with water up to his ears and right under his chin, just looking back up at me, like, ‘Are you going to get me out of here mom?’” Marla McEntire, 34, recalled.
McEntire, who’s 5 feet tall and 160 pounds normally, never had a noticeable baby bump in the nine months leading up to her child’s February birth, she said.
“I just looked like maybe I ate a big burrito,” she said. “If you saw my size and the way that I didn’t show, it’s astonishing how he could be in there and me not know it.”
The mother-to-be only ever suspected she might’ve been pregnant when her period failed to arrive in August — but a Clearblue pregnancy test came back negative.
“I just went on about my life,” said McEntire, whose periods resumed regularly after that.
“I never felt any kicks — I never felt anything,” said McEntire, who has been detailing her “miracle journey” on TikTok.
McEntire’s pregnancy even went undetected by a doctor she visited while struggling with stomach pain in January — just one month before she gave birth.
The doctor chalked McEntire’s discomfort up to having her gallbladder removed at 23, which often makes her constipated.
So on Feb. 27, McEntire assumed her abdominal pain was from being backed up.
“I had had constipation pains before, but never as bad as it was then,” she said.
McEntire’s dad, Kevin, whom she shares a home with, had just returned from a four-day vacation on Amelia Island, Fla., to find his daughter “crying and screaming in pain,” he recalled.
“Every 20 minutes, I would hear her in a lot of pain. Then it got a little shorter between distances…Now I know it was contractions — but at the time, we didn’t have a clue,” Kevin said.
Still convinced she just needed to go number two, McEntire went to the bathroom a final time and “pushed really really hard.”
“When I did, it literally felt like everything fell out of my body,” McEntire said. “I was like ‘Oh my God, Dad, it’s a baby!’ I was scared to death. I was shocked.”
Before calling 911, a frantic Kevin snatched his grandson out of the toilet, cleaning the baby’s airways so he could breathe.
It was an easy job, Kevin said, because the infant “was pretty clean when he came out… Except for what was in the toilet with him,” McEntire said.
In the terrifying 20 minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive, “we didn’t know if he was going to die, if I was going to die,” McEntire said.
The family was relieved when doctors said the baby had been carried to full term and was healthy — and that mom was in the clear too.
They named the 5-pound, 18-inch long tot Atlas Cohen McEntire.
McEntire has taken birth control pills since she turned 18, right up until her son was born, and now realizes they failed her on Atlas’ May conception date.
“There are still some issues with the paternity of the father that I’m dealing with,” McEntire told The Post.
Although McEntire’s friends and family were “flipped out real good” when they heard the big news, everyone has shown their love and support for the new mom and baby, Kevin said.
“Marla has beautifully taken on her unexpected role of motherhood,” said McEntire’s sister, Lacey, 27, who doesn’t have kids of her own. “I never thought I would be an aunt and now I’m overwhelmed with love for this baby boy.”
Even though she never thought she would have kids, McEntire couldn’t be happier about her birth experience — and the timing.
“It wasn’t being a mom that always scared me. It was pregnancy and labor. And, literally, God just handled that for me.”
She was lucky Atlas arrived when he did: two days later McEntire was slated to go on a camping trip and attend a music festival with friends.
“If I would’ve had him in a porta potty at the festival, I don’t know if either of us would’ve made it,” she said.
Now, “Atlas is my little best friend…I absolutely love being a mom,” she gushed.
