The term menopause derives from the Ancient Greek menos meaning month and pausis meaning a cessation. It is strangely fitting then, that it should be from a Greek research team that the news came this week of a new treatment that might reverse the process.

As a single woman in her 40s who would have loved to become a mother, I wrestled for a long time with the question of exactly when it is too late even to consider the possibility of pregnancy and of having my own child.

Mine had been a continuous case of evaluating my wish for a baby against my circumstances. Single motherhood was not what I had hoped, either for myself or to offer to a child, so I hoped then to change the circumstances.

But time was literally of the essence. Additionally, and as is the case for many women I know, the big M can seem to loom for a number of rapidly passing years. Talk of the experience (and there is a lot of it) tends to come in headlines and in whispers, but in nothing that shifts the sense of a private reckoning.

As women, we are born with a finite number of eggs in place. And it was in fact a Greek doctor who confirmed, his face illuminated by the eerie hues of an ovarian scan, that it is the quality of a woman’s eggs and the state of her ovaries that are the real bars to a successful pregnancy at my age. It is a pronouncement that is difficult to hear, but which brings an “order of things” closure.

I consider it with a mix of that specific intense sadness and some comfort that the shutting down of possibilities is inevitable. That age should decree it is, for me, the only end. I almost wish for it.

This week’s news hinted at a future in which that “order” might be undone. Using a “platelet-rich plasma”, the Athens-based research team has been able to generate the production of new eggs in a woman beyond menopause. The method is itself in its infancy, but its implications reach to our aged future.

Dr Konstantinos Sfakianoudis speaks of a “new window” of possibility, for woman to regain their lost fertility. Interested at my own squeamish response, I read about ovaries being “kickstarted” and have the sense of a rundown battery receiving a jolt of new life. A dividing line that is the mother’s age threatens to fall away. Where does this sit between medical advance and lifestyle choice?

Any personal reservations about this treatment have to be considered in the light of its future recipients. The vast hope it might offer to those who, through illness or for other reasons, experience menopause “before their time” cannot be gainsaid. And it is interesting that back in 1990 when such a reversal was discussed, albeit through the use of a different method, these were the intended recipients of it.

In removing some of the obstacles of a would-be mother’s age, the question of the age at which it is OK to have a baby is all the more pressing. “Kickstart” and “needn’t be the end” conjectures conjure a disconcerting limitlessness, or a need to make the upper age limit hinge on something else.

Talk of closure can follow hot-footed on many endings, the supposition being that it is being “really at an end” that permits the getting over it. In advance of it, the “change” can seem a traumatic prospect – but one, somewhere between taxes and death, that occupies the category of a certainty, a part of life.

The removal of a limit can characterise medicine at its best, and at its most disconcerting. What feels now like a rarefied opportunity may, for Generations X and Y, be an assumption. I am disconcerted by it, perhaps even slightly jealous. B ut it is interesting to me that the prospect of that line being taken away can prompt a wish to reinstate it.