With these words Tuesday, a 47-year-old woman, Muinat Oladipo, expressed her deepest joy and welcome her first child into the world at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH), Kwara State after 20 years of marriage without conception.

The university delivered the woman of a baby girl through its third successive Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART).

Oladipo, married to a 62-year-old man, Asimiyu Oladipo, is a resident of Agugu in Ibadan Oyo State and a seller of variety of products at Agbeni, Ibadan.

After the delivery via a caesarian session at about 10:45 am by a team of gynaecologists led by the Chief Medical Director of the UITH Prof. Abdulwaheed Olatinwo, the mother, gazing at the baby weighing 3.2kg, said sobbing, "so I can be a mother at last."

UITH is the third public hospital in Nigeria after National Hospital in Abuja and the University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH) with the services of the ART unit.

Olatinwo, in whose tenure spanning about five years now, the Renal Unit of the hospital had also performed the first kidney transplant in a male patient, said arrangement had been concluded for the first Open Heart Transplant (OHT) of the UITH by June this year.

The elated Olatinwo, a professor of gynaecology, disclosed how the hospital had sponsored to India on training a team of gynaecologists led by Dr. Lukman Omokanye, to learn the skills of the IVF.

Already, the IVF as a unit of the hospital, has become a much sought after centre by the patients and their relatives just as it has equally become a financial autonomous section.

The CMD noted: "We don't need to travel outside Ilorin for what can be done here. The IVF, depending on its type, can be done here with a paltry sum of about N600,000. We even give some rebate, through the hospital revolving funds, to some indigent patients.

But we are canvassing more of private support for the unit, especially in the area of adoption of some couples in need of its services. Today, we are training doctors from other hospitals on the IVF. Very soon, we shall be receiving patients from outside the country paying us hard currencies to strengthen the nation's exchange rates capacity."

He promised greater rewards for any staff of the hospital who excels in his daily activities, just as he sounded a note of warning to "those pulling down the efforts of the government at improving the health status of Nigerians. "We will not stop our works until the UITH becomes a one stop hospital."

Speaking on her ordeal, the woman said: "I had lost every hope of having my own baby again in life. I had been to many hospitals, visited countless spiritualists, to no avail. But today, looking at this baby, I know that there is nothing God can't do. I thank God and all the health workers who took very good care of me here at the UITH."

Although not the only wife of her husband, she said she was married to him some 20 years ago without any issue. Muinat recalled how she was 12 years ago diagnosed of Fibroid (Myomectomy) in a private hospital in Ibadan where the growth was also promptly removed.

When all efforts at conceiving failed even after the operation, the woman with many medical terminologies, apparently due to her ordeal, said she was referred to the UITH for more investigations on her reproductive system. This, according to her, was five years after her last menstruation.

"The UITH doctors told me of the need to make my womb active because a woman of my age and who had last seen her menstrual period some five years ago would practically be having a dead womb.

"They commenced treatment with me by first placing me on medication. When it was time, they fertilised my eggs with the semen of my husband. On the third day, they transferred three embryos into my activated womb. After three weeks, they conducted a pregnancy test on me and it was positive.

"It was like a dream to me when the doctors asked me to commence ante natal at the sixth week of the pregnancy. My husband asked me to hide in Ilorin putting up with my brother, Alhaji Ajibade Suleiman, until I was delivered of this miracle baby today (yesterday). I never thought that a woman at her menopause stage could still have a baby."

According to Omokanye, the reproductive medicine clinician of the UITH, "we always emphasis on the issue of age in IVF procedures, because early ages make women to have the ability to produce fertilisable eggs."