Stranger Than Fiction

British Ice Skating Star Gives Birth Two Days After Dying

Jayne Soliman was declared brain dead but doctors managed to keep her heart beating until they delivered her daughter, Aya Jayne, by Caesarean section last week. Soliman, 41, was only 25 weeks pregnant when she collapsed in her bedroom after going to bed with a headache. She was airlifted to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, but was pronounced brain dead last Wednesday evening. Doctors said that she had suffered a brain hemorrhage caused by an aggressive tumor.

Soliman was given huge doses of steroids to help the unborn child’s lungs develop. Two days later, Aya was born, weighing 2 pounds, 1.5 ounces. David Phillips, 48, a close friend and fellow skater who was at the hospital with Soliman, said that her husband, Mahmoud Soliman, had had “the best and the worst day of his life."