Michaela Cotterill, aged 20, developed dozens of tumours on her lungs - a cancer which affects just one in 50,000 women - in her 34th week of pregnancy.

She was given the devastating news she had cancer just three weeks after her daughter Maesie-Claire's birth.

Specialists at Weston Park Hospital in Sheffield gave her intensive chemotherapy to fight the postpartum choriocarcinoma, and she was transferred to the high dependency unit at the Northern General Hospital where her boyfriend, Philip Day, also 20, waited anxiously by her bedside.

Within two weeks she was allowed home to Billingham, on Teeside.

Michaela has since made several 100-mile trips to Sheffield for more chemotherapy and hopes she will only need two more cycles of treatment.

She will need lifelong checks to make sure the cancer does not return but has been told she can have more children.

Paying tribute to the staff who treated her in Sheffield, a team led by specialist Prof Barry Hancock, Michaela said: "They have been brilliant - if it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't be here."

Prof Hancock, who is a world authority on the condition, said: "Michaela's was one of the most serious I have treated in 20 years. Around 600 cases occur in the region each year in the early stages, but only one or two develop like Michaela's.

"She's a real star. She responded super-well to treatment."

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