Woman Not Prepared for Photos Husband Took After Her C-Section

After welcoming a baby, many parents hope the photos they capture with their bundle of joy will be ones to cherish forever. Perhaps a picture of a mom looking radiant (and exhausted) as she dazes at her newborn, or the dad carrying the child carrier out of the hospital.

However, when Brandon Blackmon, 26, captured photos of his wife, Rinley Blackmon, 24, following their daughter’s birth in June 2024, he opted for a very different style. Instead of taking the conventional photos of Rinley in a hospital bed, Brandon thought it would be funnier to place her wheelchair in bizarre locations around the hospital.

Thankfully, Rinley, of Texas, saw the humorous side to his antics, as she told Newsweek that she “thought they were hilarious.”

She said: “Brandon took me to the Starbucks in the hospital and thought I looked funny in the wheelchair, so he took a picture. Then after that, he just started placing me in random spots around the hospital and told me to look straight and don’t smile.”

Rinley could hardly look at them without laughing, which wasn’t ideal following an emergency cesarean.

The couple’s daughter was born with cystic fibrosis and a perforated bowel. She was born several weeks early and spent 99 days in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), during which she required two surgeries.

Although Rinley might not have got the typical mother-baby photos, she was thankful for the laughter during such a difficult time.

“We thought it was really funny and sent them to my family in a group chat to make them laugh too,” Rinley continued. “It was just us being ourselves and not caring what people thought. We were just making each other laugh in light of everything with our baby.”

Of the many photos, Rinley’s favorite is the one Brandon captured from afar through a window. The others showed her wheelchair near an escalator, staring out of a window, and even facing the wall in an elevator.

Rinley captured some adorable photographs of Brandon holding their daughter in the NICU a few days after she was born. Needless to say, they are precious photos the family can actually cherish.

Brandon and Rinley are both carriers for a gene mutation which can cause cystic fibrosis, and they were told early on that there was a 25 percent chance their child would have the condition. Further along the pregnancy, genetic testing showed that she had a 90 percent chance of being affected.

“She had a perforated bowel while in my womb so they had to do an emergency C-section so she could have surgery to fix it, or else she wouldn’t have made it,” Rinley said. “They told us she would be slower at hitting milestones because she was premature, but she has hit every milestone and is like a regular baby, just with daily treatments to slow the disease.”

The Online Response

The hilarious hospital photos were shared on TikTok (@rinleyblackmon) and the post went viral with over 8.4 million views and 1.6 million likes at the time of writing.

Internet users can’t get enough of the unconventional photos, and Rinley has been blown away by the response.

She told Newsweek: “I was just thinking about what to post online next and I found those pictures. I just decided to post it because we thought they were just too funny to keep.

“I did not expect it to blow up like it did, but the comments were people saying it’s really funny and they hope they find a love like ours. We’ve enjoyed watching others laugh with us over these photos,” Rinley continued.

The couple are thrilled to expand their family even more, as they’re expecting their second child later this year. They are yet to find out whether their second born will be affected by cystic fibrosis.

Many social media users praised the couple for their sense of humor, leading to more than 9,300 comments on TikTok so far.

One comment reads: “I see his vision and I’m crying laughing.”

Another person wrote: “He took pictures of you like you were Professor X.”

While one TikTok user joked: “I just know you were in too much pain to even care what he was doing.”

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