Whenever Kassandra Bacon looks down at her baby son, she has reason to be profoundly thankful for the extraordinarily determined 18-year-old she once was.
For it was that teenage Kassandra who, confronted with the devastating news that only experimental chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant could save her life, somehow had the presence of mind to ask one more question: what could she do to preserve her chance of one day becoming a mother?
There was no time to freeze her eggs: the high-dose chemotherapy needed to start straight away.
‘So I asked: “What else can we do?”’ the now 44-year-old recalls.
The answer was an experimental procedure to freeze small slices of her ovarian tissue in the hope that, one day, they could be transplanted back into her.
The technology was unproven, the outcome unknowable.
Kassandra Bacon holds her baby son Landan, who she fought so hard to bring into the world when she was 18 years old
Yet within 48 hours Kassandra, from Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, was on the operating table, taking a desperate gamble that science would one day catch up with her decision.
And science did catch up.
Because last month, almost a quarter of a century after that teenage girl took her leap of faith, Kassandra gave birth to a baby boy using the ovarian tissue frozen a quarter of a century ago.
The arrival of Landan David Bacon is a global scientific milestone: the longest-stored ovarian tissue to be transplanted back into a woman and result in the birth of a baby.
For Kassandra, however, it is something more personal: the culmination of a remarkable journey involving years of red tape and multiple procedures – not to mention navigating a war zone – in her quest to become a mother.
‘He’s a miracle in every sense of the word,’ she says, cradling Landan in her arms as we speak. ‘Sometimes I cannot believe he is really here but every day I thank God that the teenage me had the determination to think that I was going to survive, I was going to have a life and that I needed to protect what that life looks like.’
Kassandra and Landan with consultant gynaecologist Dr Sara Matthews, a senior subspecialist in reproductive medicine
It is an extraordinary instinct to have possessed at an age when most teenagers can barely imagine beyond their next set of exams. Yet Kassandra’s determination was already being tested in ways few 17-year-olds could comprehend.
A sporty, happy-go-lucky teenager, she was studying for her A-levels in her home town of King’s Lynn in Norfolk and hoped to go to university to train as a teacher when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare form of blood cancer.
‘I’d actually been pretty unwell for some time before it was picked up,’ she says. ‘I had weight loss, night sweats and backache but I think because I was so young and fit it was easy to carry on.’
Then, when she was left struggling for breath after a netball tournament, her mum took her to A&E, where an X-ray revealed she was ‘riddled with tumours’.
The cancer diagnosis followed. ‘It didn’t sink in at first,’ she says. ‘It was fairly advanced, although I was told that it was one of the better ones to get. It was devastating, of course, although my family were amazing.’
Kassandra had chemotherapy, after which she was told she was on the road to recovery.
Dr Matthews introduced Kassandra to Professor Dror Meirow, who agreed to carry out the transplant – a hugely important step on Kassandra’s journey to motherhood
Within months, however, the cancer returned, this time even more aggressively. Treating it required a gruelling regime of experimental chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and drugs which, in combination, would destroy whatever remained of her fertility.
What’s more, there were no guarantees. ‘The doctor looked me and Mum straight in the eye across the table and said it was a 50-50 chance of success,’ she says.It was against this backdrop that Kassandra asked the question that would come to define her future: with egg freezing off the table because of the time it would take, when she had none to lose, what else could be done?
It was then that she learned that, via keyhole surgery, biopsies could be taken of her ovarian tissue – which contained thousands of immature eggs – and preserve them with a view to being grafted back on to her ovaries years later, potentially switching them back on, re-establishing a menstrual cycle and releasing eggs.
That was the theory, at least. Back then the technique was in its infancy and there had been no live births.
‘The one thing I had was time on my side; I just had to trust in the science,’ she says now.
Her tissue, harvested by an NHS team led by embryologist Martyn Blayney, was frozen in liquid nitrogen at Bourn Hall Fertility Clinic in Cambridge.
Weeks of gruelling, invasive treatment followed: for six weeks Kassandra lived on a specialist cancer ward at Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
‘I was lucky I eventually walked out of there. Not everybody did,’ she says.
While full recovery took many months, she was eventually told she was in complete remission and, by the age of 23, was discharged from specialist care. ‘They said, “Kas, go out there and live your life.”
‘My risk of the cancer coming back was then the same as everyone else’s,’ she says.
She did just that, going on to build a successful career in banking – she is now a senior product owner for digital banking – while thoughts of motherhood were temporarily pushed to the back of her mind. ‘I didn’t want to rush into anything until I’d met the right person,’ she says.
Then, aged 29, she met her partner Daniel and, by the time she was 32 and with the couple living together, both were ready to try for children. Yet while her periods had returned for a time in her 20s, they had by then completely stopped. Fertility investigations subsequently revealed that Kassandra had gone through the menopause, meaning there was no chance of becoming pregnant naturally. ‘So that’s when the research started and the real journey began,’ she smiles.
Today Kassandra admits she could never have foreseen the length of that journey: a decade-long fight to find someone willing to transplant her ovarian tissue back into her.
Consultations in both the UK and abroad, including in Brussels, all ended the same way: specialists were unwilling to take the risk with the still relatively new procedure – the first live birth following an ovarian tissue transplant was in 2004 – while red tape proved an obstacle to travelling abroad. Because her tissue had been frozen before the UK introduced regulations on storage in 2007, ‘no one wanted to touch it’.
Years passed as Kassandra and Daniel fielded blow after blow. ‘You have to just dust yourself off, pick yourself up and try again – knocking on the next door, trying the next email, the next contact,’ she recalls.
Finally, in 2023, came a breakthrough. A doctor in Scotland put Kassandra in touch with consultant gynaecologist Dr Sara Matthews, a senior subspecialist in reproductive medicine who had previous experience with ovarian tissue transplants.
‘And she was the one who blasted the pathway open for me,’ Kassandra says.
‘For the first time I had hope, because she said, “We’re going to do this.” She is my angel.’
Sara introduced Kassandra to Professor Dror Meirow, an Israeli doctor who had performed other successful implantations and agreed to carry out the transplant. Kassandra’s precious slivers of tissue were then transported to the Sheba Medical Centre near Tel Aviv.
It was a hugely important step on Kassandra’s journey to motherhood, although further obstacles lay ahead.
‘I only had these four tiny slivers but the doctors had to thaw one to make sure there were no cancer cells putting me at risk and check it was viable tissue.
‘That took a couple of weeks,’ Kassandra recalls.
And while the tissue was given the all-clear, there was another unexpected and traumatic hurdle. Less than a fortnight after Kassandra had booked her air ticket to Israel on October 7, 2023, Hamas launched its appalling coordinated attack.
‘My precious tissue was now sitting in a war zone,’ Kassandra says. ‘And I couldn’t get to it.’
Days turned into agonising weeks before, in May 2024, she was told there was a window in which she could fly to the clinic and have the procedure.
‘It was still a war zone, it was still a no-fly zone, but we were reassured by the medical centre everything was fine and it was a case of now or never,’ she says.
After successful surgery, Kassandra flew home. ‘As our plane took off, news reports said drones had started firing over the airport,’ she says. Yet even with the transplant successfully completed, another agonising waiting game followed: would it actually restore her fertility?
‘I don’t know whether she did it deliberately but Sara kept the statistics from me, because just over 50 per cent of all tissue transplants don’t work,’ she says.
‘If I’d had those statistics on a sheet of paper and looked at them in black and white, I don’t know whether I’d have been so determined.’
Kassandra had been told that, if it came, her period would likely start around four months after implantation. In her case, it took seven, arriving in December 2024.
It meant that, finally, she was ovulating. ‘I can’t even describe how I felt,’ she says. ‘It was amazing. My body had regenerated.’
Determined to try to conceive naturally, Kassandra and Daniel waited another six months before, having not fallen pregnant, deciding to embark on IVF under the care of Dr Matthews.
‘It’s taxing physically and emotionally, and also we were trying to keep it from people because it was our journey and we didn’t know the outcome,’ she says.
It was also something of a rollercoaster. The first round failed to produce a single viable egg, while the second produced an egg which did not ‘take’.
By December, the third attempt had produced just one frozen embryo – an embryo which, it turned out, would eventually become Landan.
Kassandra learned it had worked on Christmas Day last year, when a thin blue line appeared on her pregnancy test.
‘There aren’t really words to describe it,’ she says.
‘The first thing I did – even before I wished my family a Merry Christmas – was text Sara a picture of the test saying, “I think we’ve done it.” She replied saying it was the best Christmas text she would ever receive.’ Nonetheless, after everything she had endured to get there, Kassandra admits it was impossible to shake a permanent low-level anxiety throughout her nine-month pregnancy.
‘We boxed up our happiness until the 12-week scan and then we let it out, little by little after that,’ she says.
‘I loved being pregnant but I always felt that, until that baby was in my arms and I was looking into their eyes, I wasn’t going to believe that it was true.’
Finally, on September 9, Kassandra’s long-cherished dream came to pass when she gave birth by caesarean section at University College Hospital in London and Landan David Bacon was placed into her arms for the first time. ‘There wasn’t a dry eye in the room, from the doctor to the anaesthetist, because they all knew our story,’ she says of that magical moment. ‘It was just amazing.’
A month on, motherhood remains bewitching, even with the night feeds and interrupted sleep. ‘He’s been the most amazing baby, just so chilled out,’ she says of her newborn son.
If there is one regret, it is that she had to fight so hard and for so long. ‘It just took me such a long time to find those wonderful people that have helped me get here,’ she says. ‘I could have been a mum at 33 rather than 44.’
Her dream also came at a price: with no NHS funding available, she spent £50,000 pursuing her dream of becoming a mother. ‘I don’t regret a single penny but it’s been tough and we had to make a lot of sacrifices,’ she says.
For Dr Matthews, Kassandra’s story has particular resonance: more than two decades ago, she was part of the Cambridge team which agreed to freeze the then 18-year-old’s ovarian tissue before cancer treatment destroyed her fertility.
The odds were daunting – and the fact that Kassandra overcame them has implications which extend far beyond one remarkable birth, offering hope to thousands of girls and young women undergoing cancer treatment which threatens their fertility, but who need chemotherapy too urgently to undergo egg collection.
‘It gives huge reassurance for survivors of childhood cancer that the tissue is okay to keep for a long time in the freezer,’ Dr Matthews says.
‘It gives them hope that they can potentially have their own biological child in the future.’
Like Kassandra, she would now like the NHS to fund ovarian tissue transplants for women whose tissue was stored before the regulations came into force in 2007.
‘The NHS committed to doing the tissue storage in the first place – they should at least commit to putting it back in for them,’ she says.
For Kassandra, it is an investment in hope – a hope that now has a name.
‘I will never stop being grateful,’ she says, as she cradles her newborn son. ‘He is the greatest gift.’
If you would like to donate to Kassandra’s crowdfunding appeal to help cover the cost of her fertility treatment go to: gofundme.com/f/help-kass andras-extraordinary-journey-to-motherhood