Skating champ gives birth days after her own death

by FOXSports.com

Mrs. Soliman was a former British ice skating champion. (Courtesy of Times Online UK / Special to FOXSports.com)

She became a mother.

Mrs. Soliman suffered a brain hemorrhage but was kept alive by machines before doctors were able to deliver her daughter, Aya Jayne, by Caesarean section, according to The Times of London. Aya is the Muslim word for "miracle."

"She is so tiny, but she is a little fighter just like her mother," Mahmoud Soliman, the girl's father, told The Times.

Mrs. Soliman was only 25 weeks pregnant when she complained of a headache and collapsed in her bedroom on Wednesday. After arriving by air to a hospital in Oxford, England, she was declared brain dead and given large doses of steroids to help her unborn baby's lungs develop. Doctors then performed the emergency C-section in hopes of giving her child life.

"A midwife picked tiny Aya up and put her little face up to Jayne's," family friend Lucine Phillips told The Times. "It was just like welcoming any new baby into the world ... but we also had to say goodbye to Jayne."

Aya, named after the Muslim word for "miracle," was born at 25 weeks. (Courtesy of Times Online UK / Special to FOXSports.com)

Aya was immediately transferred to the intensive care unit. Soliman was originally told his daughter would have to be there for two weeks but was then doing so well that she was transferred to a local hospital on Saturday — the day of her mother's funeral.

Mrs. Soliman, 41, was best known as the British professional free skating champion in 1989. She also appeared in several international competitions in the 1980's.

When she left competitive skating, Mrs. Soliman went on to teach, including time in Dubai where she met her husband. Aya was their first — and now only — child.

For more information on this story from The Times of London, click here.