I was 44 when I had my beautiful daughter
After much research, I developed a ‘pregnancy protocol’ which resulted in 4 pregnancies over the age of 40! Once I started getting pregnant, my problem became miscarriage, not infertility. The first 3 naturally conceived pregnancies ended in miscarriage, but as I refined my protocol and as I got healthier and more hormonally balanced, I finally carried my last pregnancy to term without complications. I was 44 when I had my beautiful daughter.
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My mom had me at 45. She is the best mother, and I am so glad she waited. Now I am 25, she is 70, and she looks and feels better then some 20 year olds.
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At age 46 (almost 47) I had a "surprise" pregnancy during Christmas! Not only was I 46, but was peri-menopausal with irregular periods AND on birth control pills.
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There is no stopping the biological clock, as the birth rate shows. In 1999, there were 622,000 babies born in England and Wales. The most productive group, surprisingly, was the women aged 30-34: they had 185,300 babies. By the time women reached 40-44, they produced 13,600 specimens, and at 45-plus, 635 gave birth. In fact, nearly 300,000 women over 30 had babies, a cheering thought, until you think of the nappies.
But the figures leave much in the dark. How many 40-plus women are still trying, how many are still using contraceptives, how many are already infertile? Looking back can cast some light. In 1938, the number of women having babies in the 30-34 age group was actually smaller than today, even though the birth rate was roughly the same. Madonna and Cherie wouldn't have even made a paragraph then, when 25,000 women in the 40-44 age group gave birth - almost double current levels - and 2,200 babies were born to women over 45. That's almost four times as many as now. Clearly, choice, as well as biology, plays an important part - the really sharp decline in the birth rate for 35-plus women came in the 1970s, when it halved, coinciding with easier access to the Pill and abortion.
So, by when should you have your fertility tested? Unfortunately, exactly at what rate fertility declines is impossible to say. Nobody has measured the number of women trying to get pregnant at 40, say, and studied how successful they are. To state, as one Sunday broadsheet report of the American campaign did, that the rate of conception drops to a mere 2 per cent at 40 is very bleak and misleading.
No one can deny that you may have to wait longer to get pregnant once you are in you mid- to late-thirties, or that you may fail. As someone who did have a baby at the drop of a hat at 40, and another, albeit after three miscarriages, at 46, my advice is this: next time you see a shock-horror headline about older mothers, just turn the page.
Full article: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20010816/ai_n14411704
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My mom had me at 46 years old. I am now 17 years old.
TODAY'S BOOK SUGGESTION:
You Can Get Pregnant Over 40, Naturally II: Overcoming infertility and recurrent loss in your late 30s and 40s naturallyby Sandy Robertson
-- After years of infertility and failed fertility treatments, Sandy Robertson developed an all-natural pregnancy protocol leading to the birth of her daughter at the age of 44.
In this new expanded edition, she shares her research including over 100 references.
She explains how she:
- Overcame recurrent miscarriage
- Conceived multiple times of the age of 40 with one Fallopian tube
- Balanced hormones
- Increased pelvic circulation
Paperback: 248 pagesClick to order/for more info: You Can Get Pregnant Over 40, Naturally
I am TTC and I was 45 in October. Have 20 month old son, whom I gave birth to at age 43.5, conceived him naturally and had no problems. I would love for him to have a baby sister or brother, but have been TTC for 3 mos now with no luck yet. I really like reading the inspiring stories on this site. By the way, both my grandmothers gave birth in their 40s. My dad's mom had him when she was 45.
LONG ODDS, GREAT JOY
At 50, first-time mom savors her miracle
Published: Sunday, December 31, 2006
NEWS 01D
By Alayna DeMartini
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
It's just after 8 p.m., a few minutes past Oliver's usual bedtime. He's sucking on a bottle. His eyes start to flicker, and his sucking slows.
His father, Tom Hebert, runs his hand along the thin line of dark fuzz on the boy's head. At times, Tom wonders what it will be like when Oliver is nearing adulthood and his parents are nearing retirement.
When only a few drops of milk are left in the bottle, Oliver's mother, Amy, picks him up, begins rocking him and kisses his head. She and her husband start the closing song to the old Lawrence Welk Show:
Good night, sleep tight and pleasant dreams to you. Here ' s a wish and a prayer that every dream comes true...
Then another song: Jesus loves the little children...
Tom props the little boy with the dark brown eyes on his shoulder and carries him up to his crib. Amy walks beside him. She winds up the mobile of stuffed frogs and turtles hovering above him; a lullaby plays, and they gently close the door. He doesn't cry. He doesn't wake up until about 7 the next morning, making sounds like he's trying to talk and waiting to lock another bottle onto his lips.
Astounding news
Oliver's middle name, Fortune, reveals how his parents feel about having him. Amy was 48 when she became pregnant; Tom was 45. They had been married eight months. They hadn't counted on pregnancy, but they hadn't tried to prevent it. It would be a long shot, they figured.
Then, in the summer of 2005, Amy had an unusual menstrual cycle. She went to see her doctor, who had told her a couple of years earlier that she might be entering early menopause.
A few days after the appointment, the doctor called Amy at work and asked her if she could talk in privacy. Then the doctor told her she was pregnant.
"I said, 'Yeah, but are you sure?' " Amy asked.
It felt like a miracle. How else could she explain it?
Amy called Tom and said, "You're not going to believe this." Then she told him. There was a long silence.
"I said, 'Are you there?' I didn't hear anything," Amy recalled.
Tom didn't know what to say. He was excited yet scared. Could he rear another child? It had been over a decade since he had taken care of a baby. He has a daughter and a son, both now teenagers, from his first marriage.
Amy was single until she married Tom in November 2004 and they moved to Lewis Center in southern Delaware County. She always had hoped to become a mom. If she never married, she'd adopt, she thought. And she and Tom considered adoption.
"We knew the limited odds of getting pregnant," Amy said.
So in the summer of 2005, it was thrilling to find out she was pregnant, but she feared for the baby's health because she was so much older than most mothers-to-be.
During the first few weeks, she bled. And each time, she thought, Could I be losing my baby? She and Tom braced to make it to week four, then week nine, then week 12. They didn't tell anyone about the pregnancy until 17 weeks and a couple of ultrasounds had passed.
In a lot of ways, it was hard for Amy to believe, especially because she had never felt any morning sickness. She was a little more tired than usual, but not excessively so.
Long odds
Childbirth among older women has become increasingly common nationwide, but it's still not typical. Six children out of every 10,000 born in 2005 had a mother age 45 to 49, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. That's triple the rate in 1990.
Unlike Amy, many other women who have babies in their 40s have used fertility treatment.
That's because the steepest drop in a woman's fertility is between ages 40 and 45, said Dr. Richard Paulson, who directs the endocrinology and infertility division of the University of Southern California's medical school.
The age and quality of a woman's eggs -- not her uterus -- determines her ability to get pregnant, Paulson said. And the biggest factors influencing the quality of her eggs are her genes and whether she's had a sexually transmitted disease, he said.
A 40-year-old woman has a 30 percent chance of getting pregnant if she uses her own eggs, Paulson said. By age 44, the odds drop to 5 percent.
The biggest risk of delayed motherhood is that a woman has a greater chance of getting diabetes or high blood pressure during the pregnancy, said Dr. David Ruedrich, a Riverside Methodist Hospital obstetrician-gynecologist who specializes in high-risk pregnancies.
And the risk of having a baby with a genetic abnormality also grows with the mother's age. At 40, a woman has one chance in 63 of such a pregnancy. At 48, the odds rise to one in eight.
"I've had patients say, 'I'm 37. I've had two healthy babies. Doesn't that mean I'm more likely to have a healthy third baby?' "
Not so, Ruedrich tells them.
Still, plenty of women over 40 give birth to healthy children, said Amy's doctor, Dr. David Colombo, an Ohio State University Medical Center obstetrician who handles high-risk pregnancies
The mother's age "is not the big issue that people make it out to be," Colombo said. "I think a lot of that stuff is overblown. I spend half the time telling people they're not as bad off as they think they are."
Apprehension
The ultrasound picture at 30 weeks was stuck to the side of the Heberts' refrigerator. It was the clearest picture they'd had so far of their baby, but the features, all in black ink, were hazy.
"They (doctors) say: 'Can you see the eyes? The cheeks? The face?' Uh, no," Amy said.
Still, it was a constant reminder of the new life growing inside her, their miracle.
Amy had just returned from her weekly doctor's appointment. At 34 weeks, the baby weighed an estimated 5 pounds, 8 ounces.
Every few days, Amy had to test her blood sugar with a pinprick because her doctor discovered she had gestational diabetes. That was alarming, and then the couple learned that a friend's baby, her first, had died in utero. That stirred all their fears.
"Not to sound selfish, but we were thinking about ourselves. You realize then how vulnerable the baby is," Amy said.
Their worries lessened as Amy started feeling the baby's hands or legs moving inside her. The first time was at 20 weeks when the Heberts were sitting at a symphony and Amy felt a kick.
"That made it more real for me," she said.
Dr. Colombo had the couple begin counting and recording the baby's movements at night -- usually, eight to 10 per hour. One Saturday, they'd walked around for three hours, and Amy had been lifting and moving boxes. They felt no movement from the baby that evening, and they were terrified.
Amy didn't sleep Sunday night and went to work early on Monday, figuring that was better than lying in bed worrying. That night, they felt movements again.
As smooth as her pregnancy had been -- no morning sickness, no cravings -- Amy worried that her delivery would be difficult. Tom had gained about 20 pounds, more weight than she had, and she razzed him about that.
Amy's doctor explained couvade syndrome, in which fathers-to-be gain weight, too. Neither Amy nor Tom had ever heard of it. Amy laughed as she talked about it.
"I live with a gourmet cook; what can I say?" Tom explained.
Lessons for Dad
Amy was lying on her side on a carpeted floor with a pillow between her legs; Tom knelt beside her. Two weeks before the baby's due date, Tom was learning what to do when labor starts.
"OK, contraction begins," said Debbie Barrett-Bryson, a childbirth educator for OSU Medical Center.
Tom lifted Amy's right leg, then her right arm, telling her to relax and let both fall as dead weight. Then he repeated that.
"She tells you she has a cramp in her leg. What are you going to do?" Barrett-Bryson asked.
Tom held her leg with both hands at an angle.
"She tells you, 'My back is killing me,' " Barrett-Bryson said.
Another leg cramp. Barrett-Bryson moaned, acting out a woman in labor.
He quickly shifted back to Amy's leg. Then another backache.
"My back is going to kill me, too," Tom said. All three laughed.
"You're not fast enough," Amy said, chuckling.
"OK. Contraction's over," Barrett-Bryson said.
"Take a deep breath," Tom told Amy as he, too, breathed in.
"What if she tells you she feels like throwing up after that last contraction?" Barrett-Bryson asked.
"Get a barf bucket," Tom said.
Amy laughed.
"What if there is no barf bucket in the room?" Barrett-Bryson asked.
Tom stared at Barrett-Bryson.
"What's in every room?" she prompted.
After a pause, Tom figured it out: "a wastebasket."
Joy in the moment
On April 14, Amy gave birth to Oliver at 5:45 p.m. She had a caesarean section after many hours in labor.
When he was about a month old, Oliver was sleeping six hours straight, so neither Amy nor Tom felt sleep-deprived for long. Amy took maternity leave from her job as an insurance underwriter, and Tom took a break from his job chemically treating lawns.
After he was a few months old, Oliver began sleeping eight hours, and now he's closer to 10 or 11 hours straight. For that, Amy and Tom feel lucky.
Tom is a house husband during the week while Amy works. So he props Oliver in his high chair in the morning, makes his bottle and mixes up rice cereal and fruit.
"I look at it as the best job I've ever had," Tom says.
Now at 8 1/2 months, Oliver has six teeth and weighs about 21 pounds. The shape of his face and his dark brown eyes resemble his father's. He recently learned to crawl and likes to head to the coffee table and crumple pages of magazines stacked on it or go to the fireplace and clank the fireplace tools together.
When his father says "no," Oliver stops and looks at him, but then he goes back to clanking, until Dad or Mom moves him away from the fireplace.
Sometimes Tom thinks ahead about what Oliver will be like in a decade or two. When Oliver graduates from high school, Amy will be 68 and Tom, 65. At times, Tom wonders: Will I be able to keep up?
Amy figures Oliver will help keep them young. She celebrated her 50th birthday last month. While neither she nor Tom expect to be soccer coaches for their son's team, they could be Scout leaders.
Still, Amy knows she might not live to meet her grandchildren, if she has any.
However, Amy rarely thinks ahead to grandchildren or high-school graduations. She's focused instead on all the subtle day-to-day changes in their little boy and his smile she wakes up to every morning.
ademartini@dispatch.com
Illustration: Photo appeared in newspaper, not in the archive.
LONG ODDS, GREAT JOY
At 50, first-time mom savors her miracle
Published: Sunday, December 31, 2006
NEWS 01D
By Alayna DeMartini
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
It's just after 8 p.m., a few minutes past Oliver's usual bedtime. He's sucking on a bottle. His eyes start to flicker, and his sucking slows.
His father, Tom Hebert, runs his hand along the thin line of dark fuzz on the boy's head. At times, Tom wonders what it will be like when Oliver is nearing adulthood and his parents are nearing retirement.
When only a few drops of milk are left in the bottle, Oliver's mother, Amy, picks him up, begins rocking him and kisses his head. She and her husband start the closing song to the old Lawrence Welk Show:
Good night, sleep tight and pleasant dreams to you. Here ' s a wish and a prayer that every dream comes true...
Then another song: Jesus loves the little children...
Tom props the little boy with the dark brown eyes on his shoulder and carries him up to his crib. Amy walks beside him. She winds up the mobile of stuffed frogs and turtles hovering above him; a lullaby plays, and they gently close the door. He doesn't cry. He doesn't wake up until about 7 the next morning, making sounds like he's trying to talk and waiting to lock another bottle onto his lips.
Astounding news
Oliver's middle name, Fortune, reveals how his parents feel about having him. Amy was 48 when she became pregnant; Tom was 45. They had been married eight months. They hadn't counted on pregnancy, but they hadn't tried to prevent it. It would be a long shot, they figured.
Then, in the summer of 2005, Amy had an unusual menstrual cycle. She went to see her doctor, who had told her a couple of years earlier that she might be entering early menopause.
A few days after the appointment, the doctor called Amy at work and asked her if she could talk in privacy. Then the doctor told her she was pregnant.
"I said, 'Yeah, but are you sure?' " Amy asked.
It felt like a miracle. How else could she explain it?
Amy called Tom and said, "You're not going to believe this." Then she told him. There was a long silence.
"I said, 'Are you there?' I didn't hear anything," Amy recalled.
Tom didn't know what to say. He was excited yet scared. Could he rear another child? It had been over a decade since he had taken care of a baby. He has a daughter and a son, both now teenagers, from his first marriage.
Amy was single until she married Tom in November 2004 and they moved to Lewis Center in southern Delaware County. She always had hoped to become a mom. If she never married, she'd adopt, she thought. And she and Tom considered adoption.
"We knew the limited odds of getting pregnant," Amy said.
So in the summer of 2005, it was thrilling to find out she was pregnant, but she feared for the baby's health because she was so much older than most mothers-to-be.
During the first few weeks, she bled. And each time, she thought, Could I be losing my baby? She and Tom braced to make it to week four, then week nine, then week 12. They didn't tell anyone about the pregnancy until 17 weeks and a couple of ultrasounds had passed.
In a lot of ways, it was hard for Amy to believe, especially because she had never felt any morning sickness. She was a little more tired than usual, but not excessively so.
Long odds
Childbirth among older women has become increasingly common nationwide, but it's still not typical. Six children out of every 10,000 born in 2005 had a mother age 45 to 49, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. That's triple the rate in 1990.
Unlike Amy, many other women who have babies in their 40s have used fertility treatment.
That's because the steepest drop in a woman's fertility is between ages 40 and 45, said Dr. Richard Paulson, who directs the endocrinology and infertility division of the University of Southern California's medical school.
The age and quality of a woman's eggs -- not her uterus -- determines her ability to get pregnant, Paulson said. And the biggest factors influencing the quality of her eggs are her genes and whether she's had a sexually transmitted disease, he said.
A 40-year-old woman has a 30 percent chance of getting pregnant if she uses her own eggs, Paulson said. By age 44, the odds drop to 5 percent.
The biggest risk of delayed motherhood is that a woman has a greater chance of getting diabetes or high blood pressure during the pregnancy, said Dr. David Ruedrich, a Riverside Methodist Hospital obstetrician-gynecologist who specializes in high-risk pregnancies.
And the risk of having a baby with a genetic abnormality also grows with the mother's age. At 40, a woman has one chance in 63 of such a pregnancy. At 48, the odds rise to one in eight.
"I've had patients say, 'I'm 37. I've had two healthy babies. Doesn't that mean I'm more likely to have a healthy third baby?' "
Not so, Ruedrich tells them.
Still, plenty of women over 40 give birth to healthy children, said Amy's doctor, Dr. David Colombo, an Ohio State University Medical Center obstetrician who handles high-risk pregnancies
The mother's age "is not the big issue that people make it out to be," Colombo said. "I think a lot of that stuff is overblown. I spend half the time telling people they're not as bad off as they think they are."
Apprehension
The ultrasound picture at 30 weeks was stuck to the side of the Heberts' refrigerator. It was the clearest picture they'd had so far of their baby, but the features, all in black ink, were hazy.
"They (doctors) say: 'Can you see the eyes? The cheeks? The face?' Uh, no," Amy said.
Still, it was a constant reminder of the new life growing inside her, their miracle.
Amy had just returned from her weekly doctor's appointment. At 34 weeks, the baby weighed an estimated 5 pounds, 8 ounces.
Every few days, Amy had to test her blood sugar with a pinprick because her doctor discovered she had gestational diabetes. That was alarming, and then the couple learned that a friend's baby, her first, had died in utero. That stirred all their fears.
"Not to sound selfish, but we were thinking about ourselves. You realize then how vulnerable the baby is," Amy said.
Their worries lessened as Amy started feeling the baby's hands or legs moving inside her. The first time was at 20 weeks when the Heberts were sitting at a symphony and Amy felt a kick.
"That made it more real for me," she said.
Dr. Colombo had the couple begin counting and recording the baby's movements at night -- usually, eight to 10 per hour. One Saturday, they'd walked around for three hours, and Amy had been lifting and moving boxes. They felt no movement from the baby that evening, and they were terrified.
Amy didn't sleep Sunday night and went to work early on Monday, figuring that was better than lying in bed worrying. That night, they felt movements again.
As smooth as her pregnancy had been -- no morning sickness, no cravings -- Amy worried that her delivery would be difficult. Tom had gained about 20 pounds, more weight than she had, and she razzed him about that.
Amy's doctor explained couvade syndrome, in which fathers-to-be gain weight, too. Neither Amy nor Tom had ever heard of it. Amy laughed as she talked about it.
"I live with a gourmet cook; what can I say?" Tom explained.
Lessons for Dad
Amy was lying on her side on a carpeted floor with a pillow between her legs; Tom knelt beside her. Two weeks before the baby's due date, Tom was learning what to do when labor starts.
"OK, contraction begins," said Debbie Barrett-Bryson, a childbirth educator for OSU Medical Center.
Tom lifted Amy's right leg, then her right arm, telling her to relax and let both fall as dead weight. Then he repeated that.
"She tells you she has a cramp in her leg. What are you going to do?" Barrett-Bryson asked.
Tom held her leg with both hands at an angle.
"She tells you, 'My back is killing me,' " Barrett-Bryson said.
Another leg cramp. Barrett-Bryson moaned, acting out a woman in labor.
He quickly shifted back to Amy's leg. Then another backache.
"My back is going to kill me, too," Tom said. All three laughed.
"You're not fast enough," Amy said, chuckling.
"OK. Contraction's over," Barrett-Bryson said.
"Take a deep breath," Tom told Amy as he, too, breathed in.
"What if she tells you she feels like throwing up after that last contraction?" Barrett-Bryson asked.
"Get a barf bucket," Tom said.
Amy laughed.
"What if there is no barf bucket in the room?" Barrett-Bryson asked.
Tom stared at Barrett-Bryson.
"What's in every room?" she prompted.
After a pause, Tom figured it out: "a wastebasket."
Joy in the moment
On April 14, Amy gave birth to Oliver at 5:45 p.m. She had a caesarean section after many hours in labor.
When he was about a month old, Oliver was sleeping six hours straight, so neither Amy nor Tom felt sleep-deprived for long. Amy took maternity leave from her job as an insurance underwriter, and Tom took a break from his job chemically treating lawns.
After he was a few months old, Oliver began sleeping eight hours, and now he's closer to 10 or 11 hours straight. For that, Amy and Tom feel lucky.
Tom is a house husband during the week while Amy works. So he props Oliver in his high chair in the morning, makes his bottle and mixes up rice cereal and fruit.
"I look at it as the best job I've ever had," Tom says.
Now at 8 1/2 months, Oliver has six teeth and weighs about 21 pounds. The shape of his face and his dark brown eyes resemble his father's. He recently learned to crawl and likes to head to the coffee table and crumple pages of magazines stacked on it or go to the fireplace and clank the fireplace tools together.
When his father says "no," Oliver stops and looks at him, but then he goes back to clanking, until Dad or Mom moves him away from the fireplace.
Sometimes Tom thinks ahead about what Oliver will be like in a decade or two. When Oliver graduates from high school, Amy will be 68 and Tom, 65. At times, Tom wonders: Will I be able to keep up?
Amy figures Oliver will help keep them young. She celebrated her 50th birthday last month. While neither she nor Tom expect to be soccer coaches for their son's team, they could be Scout leaders.
Still, Amy knows she might not live to meet her grandchildren, if she has any.
However, Amy rarely thinks ahead to grandchildren or high-school graduations. She's focused instead on all the subtle day-to-day changes in their little boy and his smile she wakes up to every morning.
ademartini@dispatch.com
Illustration: Photo appeared in newspaper, not in the archive.