Pregnant at 40 something

Are you approaching 40 and contemplating a pregnancy? This is what I experienced.

I will be 51 in a few weeks and my daughter just turned 8, so Maths yielding, I was pregnant at 42. This is a possibility a bit out of the norm but not so uncommon. Whether it be by accident or because you wanted to give yourself the chance of having a girl/boy after having only boys/girls, pregnancy after 40 has its perks. I can't talk about its downside because -eight years down the line- I am still delighted with how it turned out.

Every time I look at my baby girl (she will always be that, I suppose) or I get a female comment from her 'oh, so womanly' brain, I thank Life for such a precious gift. In my case, I thank God, but you can call it whatever you prefer: the Universe, Life, or else...

So, have you thought about having a child at 40? That's when I thought: "It's now or never".

I'll share my story in case you need a reference. I went to my GP at 40 and asked for blood tests to check my general health. Apart from listening to my heartbeat and measuring my blood pressure, I wanted to check the iron and cholesterol levels. These were the indicators I grew up relating to good health.

I explained to my doctor that I was considering falling pregnant at 40, so I wanted to check my general health first. Once the results came in, the doctor gave me the green light to proceed to the next visit: the gynaecologist.

I went to the doctor who was doing my yearly smear test and breast check. He said my body was ready for a baby and that I could go for it. IUD removed and it was just a matter of counting the days after the next period.

Eventually, the pregnancy came. We were over the moon. A few weeks into the pregnancy and bleeding started, so I thought "This is it". It wasn't meant to be. My husband and I remained cool about the whole process. After all, we were already a family of four, with two lovely boys growing healthy and strong.

But this was a tough cookie. The pregnancy continued. Once the bleeding stopped, the heartbeat was present and strong. The obstetrician recommended to continue life as normal, since, he said: "what's meant to be will be". He wasn't very enthusiastic about me being pregnant at such a "risky" age.

And it was meant to be. The delivery date came and I was so ready. I had refused screening tests, as I suffered uncertainty with the first two pregnancies, only to deliver perfectly healthy babies. I was willing to welcome a baby with any challenging condition into our family. And she came to us with a 10/10 score on that test they do on newborns.

A 50-year-old mother of a primary school child

Yes, I am a 50 something-year-old mother of a second grader. And I am NOT the only one. I was so pleased to see another middle-aged mother of my daughter's classmate who had a son 18 years after her eldest. Good on them. 

I am closer in age to most of the grandmothers of my daughter's classmates. And I am OK with that. My daughter loves me and she's never complained about having an older mum or a 10 year older brother. 

Her older brothers adore her and she adores them. Having a baby after 40 is an experience I can fully recommend. I am more tired than I was in my 30s, when I had my sons, but I am so much more relaxed now, that I think it compensates. 

What do you think? Would you have a baby at 40?

Did you correct strong myopia with laser? Beware of premature cataracts

In my late 20s, I had my myopic eyes lasered to correct my short-sightedness of -8 degrees. If you’re not acquainted with eye measurements, that meant I couldn’t find my spectacles using my eyes unless they were right in front of them, at 1 cm of distance, the furthest. That means I couldn’t count on my vision unless I had my spectacles on my nose.

It was a dependency that led to my decision of correcting the problem permanently without the use of contact lenses. I was a young girl when hard contact lenses became popular and at the age of thirteen, I started using soft contact lenses.

What it means to be a young contact lenses adopter

When I took my son for contact lenses at 13, the doctors told me that he was too young. Studies on the long-term use of contact lenses showed that you should be at least 15 to start using contact lenses on regular basis. This was information given to me by specialists in 2012.

From my experience as a regular contact lenses user since the age of 13, I had to stop wearing them at 23. And this is exactly what those later studies suggested. Ten years was the maximum time your eyes could bear having contact lenses on if you started before you were 15. Well, it was too late for me, so at 23 I had to go back to wearing spectacles on daily basis and I would wear my contacts when occasionally going out at night or for special events.

The thought of being able to see well again as soon as I opened my eyes in the morning made laser surgery extremely tempting. By 1998 the procedure was mostly automated and the probability of a full recovery was very high.

I was warned

I remember being warned of how I wouldn’t be able to undergo cataract operation in the future if I had the laser surgery. In my late 20s, cataract sounded like a very far away possibility for me. “I might not even make it to such old age when my eyes will be affected by cataracts”, I thought.

I was determined to eliminate my myopia or shortsightedness with this simple procedure I had the opportunity to go through, so I did. And I saw clearly for 15 years with just a little bit of astigmatism that couldn’t be corrected then via laser.

What happened next

In my 40s I needed reading glasses, as this is the age when your eye lens (the one inside the eyeball we cannot see) loses its ability to focus at closer distances. I started using multifocal lenses on my spectacles to be able to see crystal clear when needed. I was very dependent on the Sydney road maps, with very small letters, so I made sure that I could see properly both near and far.

Sixteen years after the laser procedure

In 2014 it started to become difficult for my optician to find the right prescription for my lenses. He suggested I visited an Ophthalmologist and I did but there was no improvement. It seems she didn’t consider the possibility of cataracts in my eyes then or they were not yet obvious.

Fast forward three years and I recently visited the best eye clinic on the island. Modern technology and the most ethical and professional personnel diagnosed premature cataract.

What is premature eye cataract?

I was asked if I had hit my right eye or if I suffered any injuries in that area of my head. No, I hadn’t. The optician found a huge increase in my shortsightedness over a period of two years. He suspected and checked my eye’s lens. There it was: deposits that interfered with the passage of light made my vision blurry. My new Myopia was caused by the cataract. But I’m only 50. Isn’t eye cataract supposed to appear at an older age like 60-65?

The eye doctor who performed my laser procedure in 1998 is still active and I went to his clinic to get the map of my cornea before the laser procedure. He told me that you can get premature cataract when you have corrected a strong myopia with laser. The cornea (the layer that causes refraction of the light for the formation of the image on your retina) is hit by the laser to make it thinner and that is a traumatism on that tissue, thus I had an eye injured by the laser procedure. Actually, I have both eyes injured.

Almost 20 years after my laser procedure I could have my intraocular lens replaced and the cataract removed. I can now see bright and clear and am very grateful for technology and the hard-working doctors and nurses who dedicate their lives to make our life quality better than it would be without them.

Is limited time limiting you?

So many chores and so little time. Is this defining you?

There are ways to manage your time and make it work in your favour. Make sure you prioritise in such a way that your own wellbeing is on the top of the list. 

You must include at least one of these dopamine-releasing activities every day:

• Create something: from a healthy meal to pruning your bushes or arranging flowers in a vase, there are many simple free activities that will give you pleasure.
• Move your body: go for a walk, stretch, follow a yoga video for 10 minutes. 
• Listen to your favourite tune: you can do this while driving, walking or resting. 
• Look inwards: become aware of your breath and your thoughts. Think positive, remember to count your blessings. 
• Drink plenty of water.
• Rest.

Do something that will add to your personal goals in the long term. 

Do you want to write a book, have you started one but haven't written in a while? Do you want to learn a new language or another skill? Make sure you include small steps towards fulfilling your vision on regular basis.

You can spread a long to-do list horizontally over time to make it happen. Instead of looking at a scary tower-like stack of errands, jobs and wishful goals about your own personal projects like fitness, diet, hobbies or generating income, give yourself a year, two years or even ten years and work on achieving what’s important to you.

Plan

Once you've pleased yourself with a couple of activities that should be completed regularly, use a weekly planner to define what you will be doing and write down deadlines for your personal projects. Keep it real, don't make each day too demanding. Remember to spread the activities horizontally.

Focus

The key to being efficient is tackling one chore at a time. Whether you can finish it in one go or you can complete small stages of a longer process in a given time period, give it your full attention and then move on to what's pending in other areas of your to-do list.

Adjust

Allow for changes as you go along your plan. There will be matters to attend that will arise unexpectedly. Life happens. Make sure that you remind yourself that you can reschedule non-urgent tasks for later. 

Delegate

You can't be everywhere all the time, choose to carry out those chores you enjoy the most and ask another member of the family to complete others. It takes some thought and time to communicate with others but you can find convenient arrangements by just considering what others could be doing. 

Remember

The happier you become, the more you'll have to offer to those around you. You will be a more pleasant person to be with and you will attract positivity into your life. 

Gratitude is the right attitude

Wherever you are today, there is always someone in a worse position than you. Gratitude is a reminder of what we have as opposed to complaining about what we don't.

Making a list of three good things that happened to you every day before going to sleep is a great way to shift your mindset. Sheryl Sandberg in her commencement speech At Virginia Tech acknowledged that this practice had helped her in carrying on with her life after her husband Dave suddenly passed away long before his 50th birthday.

Did you know that....

If you let your mind wander it will lean towards negativity because the most primitive part of the brain takes over our thoughts. Its function is survival so it must imagine the worst possible scenario, making our perception of reality a negative one.

Solution: Nurture positive brain activity by rising to new challenges.

Mithu Storoni is a neuroscientist who explains this in more detail in a TED talk about how you can make your brain grow happy. The key is to engage your mind in neurological activities that will keep negative thoughts at bay. One way is to explore new territories like learning a new subject. She also talks about the benefits of feeling gratitude for what we have because it makes us focus on the positives of our reality. In this way, we will be storing happy memories that we will revisit during our sleep.

LIsten to her talk here:

Here’s a list of things you can feel grateful for:

• Health
• Pets
• Children
• Home
• Room
• Kitchen
• Nice weather
• The sense of sight
• Parents
• Life partner
• Any body part you like: skin, eye colour, hair texture
• Reproductive organs

None of the above even have to be perfect, remember that some people don’t have any at all.

Care to share?

What are you grateful for today?

Why Celebrate your fifties

I turned 50 and celebrated

You must celebrate too

Not everyone makes it to 50. I started losing friends and teammates since my early teens. It was shocking to learn that someone who had been playing the violin with me at the youth orchestra was no longer available. He had been killed in a car accident.
Then another fellow violinist got cancer at 19. He made it through the operation and recovery and has now passed the 50 mark. Other weren't in the group of the survivors.
In my mid-20s a dear fellow student from University passed away in his sleep, possibly due to a stroke.
As I got older, more casualties occurred around me. We lost friends to accidents and health failures at about one every couple of years. Some affected me more than others. One particularly put me face to face with the fact that I could be next or that it could have been me. It was one of the reasons why I became an author.
You must start celebrating life too. If you don't like celebrating you get older, bear in mind that you are fortunate to be able to read this today. You can start looking into this negativity today.

We somehow cope

We all have different coping mechanisms to deal with pain but this blog is not about pain, it's about reminders for us to look around and find the beauty in this jungle called life.
What would your dear friends who have parted before you think if they saw you whining while you are still alive and they're not?
We must honour them, remember them well and move on to make the best out of those years ahead of us. Or rather, of each and every day we are granted to live.

Fifty and fabulous?

It would be impossible and would do more harm than good to expect to feel bubbly every single day. We are only humans and we face health issues as we reach middle adulthood. Here are some other reasons why you ARE fabulous but you're probably not feeling it:

• You've been working 25-30 years if not more, coworkers are half your age, your body is probably struggling with toxins accumulated during the quiet development of GMOs, excessive use of pesticides for profit, refined foods and artificial flavours.
• You are targeted by cosmetic companies, beauty enhancers, hairdressers, makeup artists, fashion brands to make you buy expensive items and pampering packages because "you are worth it".
• You are done with basic experiences and now you want to move on towards exotic ones that might be dangerous.
• You might be dealing with teens, tweens or YAs who are your harshest critics.
• Your life partner has also reached middle age and could be acting selfishly, being mean and/or self-centered.
• You recently buried your parents or you are facing their late adulthood aches and pains.
• You thought you were going to enjoy the taste of freedom once your children flew the nest but you feel empty inside as you start wondering if you're not needed anymore by those same children for whom you were EVERYTHING not so long ago.

What this blog is about

Stay tuned for more reminders that can help you stay focused on your wellbeing. I will be posting about acceptance, gratitude, mindfulness, forgiveness, love, myths, facts regarding health, mind strength and more. 

You are an important part of this journey. Share with me in the comments what came to mind as you read. 

Forever grateful,

V.