Pregnancy delight for cancer survivor Sarah
ACANCER survivor who feared her illness had come back has described the moment she discovered that in fact she was pregnant – against all the odds.
Sarah Pickles, 35, from Skelmersdale, was alarmed when she began to suffer back problems and went to hospital for a scan.
She had been through gruelling chemotherapy and a mastectomy for breast cancer two years earlier, and had got the all-clear after seven tumours were removed.
The teacher and her husband, Dave, 42, were told she had just a 1% chance of conceiving after the chemotherapy, but had begun trying IVF anyway.
Sarah, who already has one daughter, Lillie, seven, said she was surprised when she went for the scan on her back and a Macmillan nurse told her that she should try taking a pregnancy test.
She said: “She asked if I thought I was pregnant – I said no, definitely not, I can’t get pregnant.
“Ten minutes later, she came back in with a pregnancy test that I had done and I think she was a bit scared to tell me because of what I had said to her, but she eventually said: ‘You’re pregnant’.
“I didn’t know what to say. I had gone from having these tests and getting reassurance that everything was okay to this.
“My husband was half way up to Everest base camp at the time, leading an expedition, when I told him.
“So he was there and I was here, pregnant with this miracle pregnancy. It was just meant to be.
“After what we’ve been through together, it’s just perfect.
“Percentage-wise, we were told the chances of us getting pregnant after chemotherapy was probably about 1%.”