Rosie Yearling, 25, loved drinking and partying it up with her friends on a regular basis. She went out often – attending friends’ bachelorette parties and occasionally going out two nights in a row – until she began to feel nauseous one night.
About a month ago, while Yearling was out, she began to feel queasy and had to rush to the bathroom to vomit. Yearling recalled that her friends even came looking for her, “I must have been sick for a long time, as some of the other girls came looking for me.”
She brushed off their concern though, joking, “I’m not too used to two heavy nights out in a row.”
Yearling was confident that taking a break from heavy drinking would set her back on her feet, but she was wrong. In the following weeks, she began to suffer from back pain and struggled to make it to work.
The pain continued – until one night, Yearling woke up screaming. There was “excruciating pain ripping through [her] stomach.”
Her parents immediately prepared to take her to the hospital, which is when her dad finally said it: “You look pregnant.”
Yearling didn’t believe her father. She and her boyfriend were always careful, and her stomach hadn’t changed in appearance at all over the past nine months.
But her father insisted, and then pointed out that her stomach was beginning to swell and feel hard to the touch.
At the hospital, Yearling’s father repeated his speculation to the doctors – all of whom agreed with him and added that she was going into labor as they spoke.
Yearling was “beside [her]self” at that point and screamed – for the next 26 hours of her labor – “I can’t do this – I don’t want this baby!”
It had never been in her plans to have a baby so young, and now that she was giving birth to her daughter, Yearling couldn’t help but “[run] through all the times [she]’d been out drinking over the last nine months with no idea of the life growing inside [her].”
The moment Yearling finally calmed down and made peace with the fact that she was starting a family with her boyfriend was when he came to visit her at the hospital, “As he sat holding her and they looked into each other's eyes I realized I had his support and I knew we'd be fine.
“I was exhausted but there was no doubt in my mind we'd be okay and we'd just get on with it and do it together. And I knew he felt the same.”
