Medical trial results in baby joy for couple who suffered four miscarriages in 13 months
Oct 14 2010 by Alison Dayani, Birmingham Mail
A WOMAN who suffered the anguish of four miscarriages in 13 months has finally given birth after pioneering treatment at a Birmingham hospital.
Thanks to the revolutionary clinical trial, Elizabeth and Jeremy Baker can now cuddle the baby they thought they would never have.
Isaac Stephen Baker was born weighing 6lbs 11oz following an emotional and tense nine months for the couple, who live in Smirrels Road, Hall Green.
After the four miscarriages, 36-year-old Elizabeth was desperate to know what had caused her to lose each baby within six weeks.
Prof Siobhan Quenby, an expert in recurrent miscarriage working at Birmingham’s Heartlands Hospital, discovered Elizabeth had too many natural ‘killer cells’ in her immune system, which would treat a growing embryo as a foreign body and attack it.
Prof Quenby put Elizabeth on to a pioneering medical trial which examined whether giving women steroids to suppress the immune system for the first two months of pregnancy, could give embryos a fighting chance of survival.
And it was such a success that Elizabeth and her business analyst husband Jeremy, aged 37, are now proud parents after years of heartache.
“I haven’t got postnatal depression, I have postnatal euphoria instead, I am just so happy,” said Elizabeth, a manager at a housing association in Oxfordshire.
“I don’t care about the 30-hour labour or sleepless nights because I am just so pleased that Isaac is here.”
Elizabeth had to be extra-careful during her ultimately-successful pregnany as she had a virtually non-existent immune system. “Jeremy and I never relaxed though,” she said. “I thought we would when we got to 12 weeks, and then after 16 weeks, and then the 20-week scan, but we were nervous wrecks. We had been through so much bad luck. We daren’t relax.”
Isaac’s birth itself on August 25 had its dramas as he was in distress and came into the world after an emergency caesarian had to be carried out.
