Oh Eun-young Asks Couple "Did You Attend School?" After Nine Months Unaware of Pregnancy

A 29-year-old wife who appeared on MBC's Oh Eun-young Report: Marriage Hell said she did not know she was pregnant for nine months, and gave birth by emergency surgery 30 minutes after arriving at an emergency room. The episode, which aired on the 2nd, featured a couple in their fourth year of marriage (she is 29, he is 30) as the "SOS couple," and it drew an unusually blunt reaction from Dr. Oh Eun-young.

The case fits a pattern the show has long leaned on: couples whose private routines look baffling to the studio panel until the details are laid out. Here the details were extreme enough that the panel was left reacting rather than diagnosing.

Why the signs went unnoticed

The wife said she had none of the symptoms people expect. There was no morning sickness and no sense of fetal movement. She has polycystic ovary syndrome and normally had a period only once every year or two, so a missed cycle did not register as a warning. In hindsight, she said, what she took for nausea was more like constant hunger: "I was hungry the second I turned around," she recalled, and she gained about 40kg.

The weight gain began after the couple moved in together. She said she weighed 43kg when she met her husband, and both of them put on weight afterward. Her back and body began to ache, and she felt a hard lump in her abdomen that would not go away. She concluded it might be uterine or ovarian cancer. Her husband, she said, insisted it could not be cancer and suggested acupuncture at a Korean medicine clinic.

During this period, at her husband's suggestion that they lose weight together, she was prescribed diet pills in July and took them for two months, through September. She went from 85kg to 73kg, a loss of 12kg, but her stomach did not shrink.

When the panel asked about fetal movement, Sohn Yu-jin raised the question directly, and the wife said there was none. Oh Eun-young replied that a baby does not stay still in the womb. The wife later said her doctor told her the baby was in a breech, diagonal position, which kept her belly from protruding much, and that she naturally has low amniotic fluid.

Thirty minutes from the ER to motherhood

The turning point came when she woke in severe pain, strained on the toilet and felt something slip out. The toilet was empty. Oh Eun-young said that sounded like a foot, and the wife confirmed the baby was breech, with a foot presenting first.

At a nearby women's hospital, she told the doctor she was not pregnant and feared she had cancer. The doctor's answer, as she recounted it, was essentially: so you're saying you didn't know you were pregnant? An ultrasound showed the baby's heartbeat. The lump she had been feeling was the baby's head, and she was already 35 weeks along. Doctors told her husband to sign the surgical consent form quickly, warning that both mother and child were at risk. Thirty minutes after arriving, she was a mother.

It was at this point that Oh Eun-young asked the couple, "You did attend school, didn't you, both of you?" They lowered their heads and laughed awkwardly. Jang Dong-min remarked that they sounded like people from a remote rural area.

A difficult start to parenthood

The husband said he too had assumed only that his wife had gained weight all over. "The baby had no nickname and we had no ultrasound photo," he said. "I was sorry I couldn't do anything for him."

The wife was candid about her own difficulty accepting the birth. When she came to after surgery, the first thing she asked for was her dog. The second thing she said was that they should send the baby for adoption, because she believed the diet pills must have harmed him. Surgical pain kept her from visiting the baby, and she first saw him on the fourth day, when she asked whether she could go back upstairs. She did not see him again until she moved to the postpartum care center.

She works in makeup and film special-effects makeup, and said her self-esteem had rested on having a job and earning well. Suddenly becoming a mother, she said, left her unable to feel much affection for the child at first.