Mom delivers identical quadruplets during pandemic – and they’re beautiful
Jenny Marr would have been forgiven for thinking there was something wrong with her unborn baby when her doctor had a peculiar look on her face during the first ultrasound...
Little did she know Dr. Lauren Murray was about to change her and her partner’s life forever.
Everyone who has been expecting a baby and has made a visit to the sonographer knows how nerve-wracking and exciting it can be.
To see something appear on that black screen and know it’s a living thing is incredibly emotional. But for Jenny Marr and her partner Chris, it was those things and much more.
The couple, from Grapevine, Texas, met in a local pub and had tried to have a baby for several months. But when Jenny finally got pregnant, she and Chris got the shock of their lives when they went in for a routine ultrasound.
That’s when Jenny realized she wasn’t carrying one baby.
Jenny explained to TODAY: “I was like, ‘Oh no, there’s no heartbeat.’ And, she’s like, ‘No, there is a heartbeat.’ She goes, ‘Y’all, there’s three babies in there.’ And we were just absolutely floored.”
Jenny and her partner Chris were naturally shocked, but the surprises didn’t end there.
Just a week later, on November 19, 2019, they visited a maternal-fetal medicine specialist for a follow-up appointment and got the same odd glance from the technician performing the ultrasound.
“The tech — who was doing the initial (scan) — she gave me a funny look. We were like, ‘Oh what’s going on now?’ We got worried again,’” Chris told TODAY.
“She was really cute. She said, ‘I’m not supposed to say this, but y’all got four babies.’”
In just seven days, they’d gone from expecting one baby to being told they were having FOUR.
Chris said: “I made the joke that I am not coming back because there are going to be five babies next time. We were just shocked. Jumping from three to four was easier to swallow. Just after that we heard they were healthy.”
Dr. Lauren Murray and her colleagues estimated that identical, spontaneous quadruplet births occur in 1 in 11 million or 1 in 15 million births … extremely rare to put it mildly.
“It’s unbelievable. It’ll never happen again in my career. I said, ‘Girl, go buy a few lottery tickets because those are the kind of odds we’re dealing with,’” Murray said. “What a miracle it was.”
Despite risks that one of the babies could pull nutrients away from the others, thus requiring surgery and causing problems, it turned out that this quartet were perfectly ready to share.