Shaun O’Keeffe is a geriatrician in Galway University Hospitals. In this blog, he introduces his recent Age & Ageing paper on delusions of pregnancy in older women.
Back in the ‘what will I do?’ period of my career, I spent six months as an Obstetrics and Gynaecology house officer: and I have the Diploma to prove it! Although I enjoyed this time enormously, until now it never really seemed to fit with my subsequent career as a geriatrician. Reports in recent years of IVF pregnancies in women aged 65 or more (which may, incidentally, at least dissuade obstetricians from their previous habit of referring to women who became pregnant after 34 years as ‘elderly’) did lead to the occasional fantasy of being ideally qualified to pioneer the field of obstetric geriatrics. Thankfully, perhaps, this seems unlikely; instead my colleagues and I present my career-to date experience of delusions of pregnancy in older women.
British Geriatrics Society 