Back in 2015, Elizabeth Kough was 35 and decided she wasn’t going to have any more children. With three kids, she decided to have her fallopian tubes removed. That meant she would no longer be able to get pregnant.
So, in 2018, she was extremely surprised when she started noticing symptoms that reminded her of how she’d felt during her pregnancies.
Unable to shake the feeling, she took a pregnancy test. To her shock, it showed what she’d suspected: a big blue plus sign.
“Of course, at first, I was shocked, and I was like, this isn’t in my plan, because I’m a planner,” said Kough. “But sometimes, the best-laid plans, you need to just do away with those.”
Kough was concerned that the pregnancy might be ectopic, meaning the baby wasn’t implanted in her uterus.
She quickly scheduled an appointment with her obstetrician who performed an ultrasound. The imaging confirmed: he was right where he needed to be. Kough couldn’t believe it.
The chances of her getting pregnant after a bilateral salpingectomy were so slim that her doctors wanted to review her charts to find out if the surgery had possibly been botched. But none of Kough’s records showed any note of mistakes happening during surgery. Ultrasounds confirmed that she had no fallopian tubes. Then, when she delivered her son via C-section in March 2019, her doctors were able to physically check the site of her 2015 surgery.
The result?
Everything had been performed correctly. Her son Benjamin is, simply, what Kough calls a “very rare baby.” And she says she’s thrilled to have him.
“He is a beautiful baby. I am exceptionally lucky to have him in my life,” she said. “I have one child leaving the house and one child coming in. It’s hard to explain. I just feel very full of joy. Very, very full. I’m very blessed to have him around. I’m shocked in a great way. I’m shocked and awed.”
Bilateral salpingectomy is the total removal of the fallopian tubes, which prevents eggs from traveling to the uterus.
It has a success rate of almost 100 percent, making Kough’s situation highly unusual.
And her doctors were as surprised as she was.
“I’ve delivered and participated in thousands of deliveries in the course of my 10-year career and this is the first of a case like this that I’ve seen,” said Dr. Dawn Heizman, a doctor at Meritas Health in Missouri who reviewed Kough’s case. “None of us have encountered this before.”
Kough said that although the initial discovery of her pregnancy was a shock, she was extremely happy.
She also joked that after her unexpected conception, she started buying lottery tickets.
Benjamin arrived healthy via C-section, weighing in at 7 lbs. and 6 oz. Although the circumstances of his conception were pretty amazing, his life is now just like any other baby’s, at home with Kough, her boyfriend, and his big siblings.
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