A State of Shock
It might have been embarrassing to walk through the lobby of the ob-gyn clinic crying, but Andrea Garduno was too unsettled to care. Anyway, she knew the entire staff at the El Paso clinic from her days working there as a student nurse. They were almost as surprised as she to learn that at 43, after sending two daughters off to college, she was pregnant again. Garduno had just one ovary and, thinking pregnancy was not a big risk at her age, had been using only contraceptive foam. ("It might as well have been Reddi-Wip," she says now.) The office manager put her arm around her shoulders and said, "Andie, don't worry. I have a friend who went through this, and her daughter just graduated from Stanford, with honors. And she's told me that this daughter has been the biggest blessing of her life."Garduno would find those words reassuring in the months ahead, but for the moment, she was focused on how to break the news to her husband. He was a urologist and she, his surgical nurse. When she reached the operating room, he was performing a needle biopsy on a patient's prostate gland. "I leaned over and said, 'I want you to know that I'm six weeks pregnant,'" Garduno recalls. "And he just got this look on his face."
The shock of accidental pregnancy in women over 40 is far more common than you might expect. True, fertility declines with age: Only 15 in every 1,000 women over 40 become pregnant, compared with about 170 in 1,000 women in their 20s. But the fact is, slightly more than half of pregnancies in older women are unintended, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research center in New York City. Only teenagers and women 20-24 have higher rates of unintended pregnancies. And like teenagers, we tend to assume -- or at least vaguely hope -- that pregnancy won't happen to us.
(Read More) http://www.more.com/2024/2476-surprise-surprise-pregnancy-over-40
