Woman gives birth to her late husband’s baby three years after he died of cancer
A widow has given birth to a daughter three years after the baby's father died.
Jason Goodsell, 30, was travelling around Australia in February 2017 with his fiancée.
Just days after he proposed, he was diagnosed with stage four bowel and liver cancer.
Before he started treatment, he and his fiancée Sian froze some of his sperm.
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The two proceeded to get married on May 3, 2019, the day of his death.
A devastated Sian still managed to go ahead with the first embryo transfer and fell pregnant immediately.
Sian gave birth to Matilda, now six months old, which the mother describes as the ‘female version of her father’.
The new mother hopes to keep Jason’s memory alive by telling stories and keeping photos around the house.
"Tilly will always know her dad,” she said.
Sian and Jason met on Tinder in 2014.
"He was so young," she said.
"He had radiation, chemotherapy, then had surgery and was fitted with an ileostomy bag.
"None of that was working and he decided to stop it."
After Sian used his embryos following his death, she found that falling pregnant was a reasonably easy process.
But Matilda’s birth was anything but, as Sian underwent an ‘extremely early labour’ at Nepean Hospital in Sydney.
"I thought they were wrong," she said about the premature delivery.
''I knew how early she was an I didn't want it to be true, as a nurse I know how dangerous it can be.''
Despite having steroids and being put on a magnesium drip to slow her labour, Matilda proved to be 'impatient', and was born at 4.56pm on December 26, 2022.
"She was taken away but was breathing on her own for 15 minutes, and then was intubated to get taken to the NICU,” she recalled.
After three weeks at Nepean Hospital, Matilda was transferred to The Children's Hospital at Westmead after developing necrotising enterocolitis (NEC).
NEC is a severe condition in which tissues in the intestine become inflamed and begin to die.
Almost a month after her birth, doctors operated for four hours to fix Matilda's perforated bowel.
Matilda spent the next 17 weeks and two days in the Grace Centre NICU until she was finally discharged.
She is now thriving at home.
"It was exciting and overwhelming to be coming home,” Sian said. ''I believe Jason was with her every step of the way, looking out for her.”
Charisa Bossinakis