Real life: “I gave birth at 46 – the nurses didn’t even bat an eyelid”

“Once you hit 40, it doesn’t matter if you feel younger, there is no tricking your eggs.”

By Lorena Otes

I’ve never really looked my age. Pity my ovaries weren’t in on the secret. Seriously though, I have always loved defying the new number assigned to me after another repetition around the sun.

I enjoy looking young. But not in a Botox filler way; I’ve never had the nerve for that. At the age of 50, I still revel in demonstrating cartwheels and backward rolls for my contemporary dance students. There’s a thing called a flip-roll that’s a bit of a party trick of mine. You go into a half backward roll, then flip onto your front in the middle. Hard to explain. Trickier to execute, but at the ripe old half-century, somehow I can still do it.

Not that any of that matters. I mean, am I really going to do a flip-roll at a party? (Err, perhaps?) Truth is, I have always looked younger than I am, for some reason. Just lucky, I guess. Even in school, I looked 12 when my classmates were pubescent 16-year-olds chasing boys.

Oh well, it has never bothered me. Until my recent confusion.

I didn’t start IVF until the age of 38. I didn’t look a day over the age of 30 at the time, and my god I could demonstrate more than just a bog-standard flip-roll. But my body was 38. My skin, my arms, my feet, my ovaries. And my eggs! My eggs had been aging right along with the rest of me. No one had told them to chuck on some moisturiser, exercise and stay young. They were old and becoming increasingly ineffective.

The story of the female biological clock: once you hit 40, it doesn’t matter if you feel younger, there is no tricking your eggs. As my age number went up, my fertility did the opposite, much like a balancing act. If I wanted to have a baby, which I desperately did, I needed to get a wriggle on.

IVF was my only option. As a Solo Mum by Choice, I was planning a donor-conceived child. My eggs would be ripened, harvested (sounds like a day at the orchard!), and injected with donor sperm.

This sounds straight forward and for a lucky few, it is. Not for me though. Like many many other women, I did the hard IVF yards of round-after-round. My miserable, middle-aged eggs did not come to the party and they were certainly not going to be performing any flip-rolls!

I always declared I’d do 10 IVF rounds, and then give up. But round 10 came and went. I was 43 when it became apparent that I may never become a mum. Regardless, I continued to plug away and in another story for another time, I finally became pregnant! What jubilation!! I can’t tell you how exciting that day was, weeing on a pregnancy stick and seeing those two ever-elusive blue lines appear.

I’d become known to the nurses at my clinic, because I had basically been paying the rent on the building they worked in with all my IVF fees. Ouch! There went my child’s college fund but… I DID IT!! They were all so excited for me.

Then. Bang! My first appointment with the antenatal nurse arrived. The moment I’d been dreaming of for so long. To walk into the maternity clinic and be treated as a pregnant woman. It was going to be HUGE: brass bands; parades; the nurses would all shake my hand and congratulate me on being so ground-breaking.

“You’re pregnant?” they would gasp in awe, “At the age of 45? Unheard of! Wow, Lorena — are you sure you’re not Superwoman?”

This is what I got, instead:

“Forty-five? Yeh, we’ve had older.”

Erm, pardon? How??

“Yeah, we had a 50-year-old in the maternity ward giving birth just the other day.”

Excuse me? But I thought I was the age-defying champion. ‘Superwoman’, you mentioned… (oh actually, that was me in my subconscious). Everyone wants to feel special I suppose. And truth be told, I was feeling pretty damned fabulous just by finally achieving pregnancy.

My visits to the antenatal clinic were all similar. I was told how ‘well’ I was doing. I waited for the clause ‘…for a woman your age,’ but it never came. The nurses were quite happy to throw around the term ‘geriatric’ when referring to my pregnancy, but this didn’t carry much weight after I learned that all pregnant women over the age of 35 are arbitrarily placed in that category.

I had a smooth, drama-free pregnancy. None of the typical ‘geriatric’ symptoms. And apparently my pregnant tummy was very ‘taut’. There you go. At MY age! I thought I may get special treatment after a certain pregnancy milestone. Thirty weeks, perhaps? The nurses would start taking more notice of my age and show some concern.

But, no. It wasn’t until I was 38 weeks pregnant one of the doctors exclaimed, “But why isn’t there anything written on your card? At your advanced pregnancy age, we need to monitor you more closely. Why didn’t you say anything?”

Me, and my non-big-mouth. I pointed to my birth date on the patient card she was holding, but she didn’t respond.

“I guess my pregnancy’s been going well, so the nurses haven’t been worried.”

The doctor booked my induction for the following day, muttering, “We’ve got to get this baby out.”

I wasn’t entirely sure why the sudden change of sentiment, but I also came to realise I no longer wanted to feel ‘special’ about being the oldest woman on the planet to ever give birth. (Or be prone to exaggeration.)

That baby came out. I’ll spare the birth details, but suffice it to say my bundle of joy arrived amid a bunch of maternity professionals who never even raised an eyebrow that I was at the ripe old potentially perimenopausal age of 46.

Not one of them even batted an eyelid. And for that, I was unexpectedly but immensely grateful.