A WOMAN aged 57 is to give birth to her first baby this week, after doctors initially feared she had ovarian cancer.
Susan Tollefsen was sent to hospital for emergency tests on her swelling stomach eight weeks ago, but was instead congratulated by the sonographer who told her she was almost 30 weeks pregnant.
She will become one of Britain's oldest mothers when
she gives birth to a baby girl, who she has already named Freya, by caesarean section this week.
Tollefsen, from Romford, east London, said yesterday: "We're very excited about it. It's our miracle baby."
The pregnancy follows several years of attempts by Tollefsen, a special needs teacher, and her partner, Nick Mayer, 46, a warehouse manager, to have a baby by IVF treatment in foreign clinics.
Tollefsen said she was referred to hospital after her GP found a "hard abdominal mass". Tollefsen said she had just undergone an examination at the private Nuffield Hospital in Brentwood, Essex, when the sonographer turned to her and said: "Congratulations."
"My initial reaction was to think: 'What a terrible way to tell me I've got ovarian cancer.' When he said: 'You're pregnant', I was literally speechless. I still couldn't believe it when he showed me the screen and said: 'Here's the head, here are the arms and here are the legs.' I was even more shocked when they told me I was almost 30 weeks gone."
She contacted Mayer with the news, having earlier phoned him in tears over fears the scan would reveal cancer. "First he was stunned and then he burst into tears."
The couple thought their hopes of a baby through IVF were over when Tollefsen suffered an apparent miscarriage after two fertilised embryos were implanted at a Russian clinic. She now believes she miscarried one twin but the other survived.
All the scans had shown the baby was developing normally, Tollefsen said. "I just feel incredibly excited. I know that when Freya is 10 I'll be 67, and I do wonder how she will feel about that, but we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
"Besides, I think there are advantages to being an older mother. You are more patient, wiser, and having worked with them all my life, I have experience of children which means motherhood won't come as such a shock."
The full article contains 399 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
