Ohh baby! 13-plus pound girl born
As Chrissy Corbitt was in the delivery room of the Orange Park Medical Center, doctors and hospital personnel laughed and began throwing out numbers.
“Fifteen pounds,” one person said.
“Fourteen-point-five,” another chimed in.
When baby Carleigh finally made her way to her father, Larry Corbitt, in the nursery, a nurse informed him that his brand new baby girl weighed a whopping 13 pounds, 5 ounces.
“I couldn’t see when they were pulling her out, and the doctors were just saying, ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,’ ” Larry Corbitt, of Keystone, Fla., said.
Hospital personnel told the proud father that Carleigh was the largest baby girl born in Clay County, only trailing the largest baby boy by about 2 ounces. The parents, who had four children before baby Carleigh, were used to having large babies — their sons had weighed between 9 and 10 pounds and both daughters more than 8 pounds.
But they were not prepared for the baby that Larry Corbitt maintains looks like a 6month-old toddler.
“We had everything covered as far as newborn clothes … but the nurse was like, ‘Well, newborns aren’t going to work,’ and threw (the diaper) in the trash,” he told USA TODAY, adding he had to run to the store to buy diapers that were big enough.
Doctors’ original estimates put the baby girl’s weight at about 11 pounds.
The Corbitts said this pregnancy was difficult. Chrissy developed gestational diabetes — a condition that causes high blood pressure during pregnancy — which also put Carleigh at risk for having diabetes when she was born, Larry Corbitt said. Also, due to Chrissy’s anemia, she had to receive blood transfusions before she could give birth via cesarean section because her iron was so low, he added.
Challenging pregnancies among women giving birth to large babies is quite common. Women having babies weighing more than 10 pounds are more prone to conditions such as gestational diabetes and birth complications.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s heaviest baby was born at 22 pounds in Seville, Ohio, in 1879.