A YOUNG mother who survived cancer and her husband have launched a business inspired by their baby daughter who was born prematurely weighing just 1lb 7oz.

Lauren and David Adams, both 31, from Newhaven, make personalised prints for family celebrations in their new venture NovaLoves, which is named after little Nova.

Now 15 months old, she spent the first three months of her life in the Trevor Mann Baby Unit at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton and the couple are donating 15 per cent of their business’s turnover to it.

After the couple made lots of new friends among the other parents with children in the unit, they began giving them personalised prints to mark special occasions. They were so popular they decided to turn it into a business, which they have just launched online.

The prints include designs of a “Novadactyl” dinosaur, a wizard’s hat reading “a little magic can take you a long way” and another reading “sleep tight little dreamer”.

David, a graphic designer, creates the designs and Lauren markets them. “The idea had been brewing for a while and then we just decided to do it,” said Lauren, who works as a water engineer. “Nova is our inspiration.”

Their daughter was born at the hospital in May 2017 and had fought off two serious illnesses, pneumonia and E.coli, before her parents could take her home in August, the month she had been due to be born.

Her birth was even more miraculous as Lauren, then 28 and engaged to David, had been diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2015. “I had major surgery to remove most of my cervix,” said Lauren. “They had to leave enough behind to enable me to have a child and I was told that there would be a higher risk of premature labour or miscarriage.

“When I was diagnosed, I just got on with it at the time. I just thought, ‘I must get through this’. But underneath I was shocked by the illness and afterwards I had a breakdown.”

“For me, everything just caved in,” said David, a graphic designer for Brighton-based event management company Yellowfish. “I had lost my dad at 18 and when Lauren was told she had cancer, I said, ‘I lost my dad and now I’m going to lose my future wife’.”

After Lauren was clear of the cancer, the couple married and Lauren fell pregnant in 2017. “The pregnancy was a mix of emotions,” says Lauren. “I bled because of the surgery and thought I was having miscarriages. Then I was told I had a lump and had to wait two weeks before I found out it was scar tissue.

“After that, it was plain sailing until my birthday. I went out and had a lovely time but the following morning, I woke up and thought I had wet myself. But my waters had broken and I went into hospital to give birth.”

Their tiny baby was born by Caesarean section at 25 weeks weighing less than a bag of sugar. She remained in the Trevor Mann Baby Unit for three months.

Find NovaLoves on Facebook at Facebook.com/NovaLovesuk/