Hempstead's Tiffany Lashaun Stewart appears on Lifetime series, 'I Wasn't Expecting a Baby!'

Cryptic pregnancy — a lack of awareness that one is pregnant — is a real, albeit little-researched, medical phenomenon. Not until 2006 did the term even exist, having previously been called “denied pregnancy.”

Conscious denial can happen, of course. But a perfect storm of circumstances can indeed result in a woman not realizing she is pregnant until labor is imminent. This was the case with Hempstead native Tiffany Lashaun Stewart, 28, one of the stars of the premiere episode of Lifetime’s “I Wasn't Expecting a Baby!,” Thursday at 10 p.m.

“I had never heard of cryptic pregnancy until it happened to me,” says single-mom Stewart by phone from the Hempstead home she shares with her mother, Waseca Cook.

But when Stewart posted about it on TikTok following the birth of daughter Paige Riley Stewart, she garnered 3.2 million views for one post alone. “And then I got the floodgates of all of these women and their testimonies about how it happened to them,” as well as outreach from the show’s casting director. (Unlike an earlier series, “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant,” on the TLC channel Discovery Health, this new show forgoes dramatic re-enactments).

In Stewart’s case the culprit was PCOS — polycystic ovary syndrome — in which the ovaries overproduce androgens, male hormones usually present in small amounts in women. This can lead to weight fluctuations and irregular or lengthily delayed monthly menstrual periods.

As the episode explores, Stewart awoke one morning in May 2022 with unprecedented abdominal pain, and was rushed to a hospital by paramedics. By coincidence, that medical facility happened to be NYU Langone Hospital — Long Island in Mineola, the very one at which Stewart says she works as an emergency-room medical assistant, currently on leave of absence. A hospital representative had no comment.

Her colleagues there understandably “were confused. As confused as I was. I was, like, ‘What's wrong? Just tell me.’ I didn't know I was pregnant, so they were really adamant about double-checking,” Stewart says. “They were, like, ‘How could you not know?’ ”

Fortunately, all ended well, and Stewart — who has never smoked but did drink socially during her unknown pregnancy — delivered a healthy baby. What’s more, in something the episode doesn’t go into, it happened to her a second time.

“I thought, ‘It couldn't happen again. That's not possible.’ But I wasn't familiar with how my body was reacting after giving birth,” she says, and in the ensuing months misinterpreted the symptoms as simply “what was to be expected. After all, everyone told me my body was going to be feeling crazy.” She went on to have son Cameron Lucas Stewart, now 9 months old.

The father of both is the same man, whom neither the show nor Stewart identify. “Unfortunately, he’s not around as much as I’d like for my kids,” she says. “The first couple weeks [after Paige was born] he was fine, but I believe he became overwhelmed because it went so crazy on social media. My daughter and I were starting to be recognized outside my home and in restaurants and even out of state, which surprised me.”