Giving birth to quadruplets is a feat in “normal” times, but one Texas woman did it during the coronavirus pandemic.
First-time parents Jenny and Chris Marr, 35, were shocked to find out that they were pregnant with three babies in November.
But a week later, an even bigger twist was thrown at them. When they went in for a followup appointment, they discovered they were actually expecting four.
“The tech, who was doing the initial scan, gave me a funny look,” Chris told Today. “We were like, ‘Oh, what’s going on now?’ We got worried again. She said, ‘I’m not supposed to say this, but y’all got four babies.’
“I made the joke that I am not coming back because there are going to be five babies next time,” he continued. “We were just shocked. Jumping from three to four was easier to swallow. Just after that, we heard they were healthy.”
On March 15, the four babies — Hudson, Harrison, Henry and Hardy — were born at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, the hospital wrote in a Facebook post.
The parents, the post says, had no history of multiple births in their family. Dr. Lauren Murray said there are only around 72 documented cases of “spontaneous, identical quadruplets.”
Even rarer, doctors found that the four babies were sharing a placenta, meaning one could potentially develop stronger than the rest.
“The babies shared incredibly well. There were no incidents on the sonogram even leading up to that where we were worried that one of them, or two or three of them, would be significantly smaller,” Murray said.
Jenny went into labour early at 28 weeks. All four of her newborn sons were born within three minutes during her cesarean section delivery, Today reports.
In early May, after 10 weeks in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, all four babies went home to start their new lives — during a pandemic.
“We just hope that this little story and our boys bring as much joy to everybody as they bring to us,” Jenny said.
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