THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 10, 1995 TAG: 9501100041
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 204 lines
IT'S A GIRL!
It's a boy!
It's a girl!
It's a boy!
The shiny Mylar signs slant diagonally up one wall in the tiny nursery. Tiny not so much because of size, but because of stuff.
Two cribs. Two dressers. An overloaded changing table. Four hundred diapers stacked in the closet.
And four babies.
This is the story of Tatianah, Breanah, Shareef and Tyreef Taylor of Portsmouth. Four months old Monday, they are probably the region's only set of quadruplets, in a state where an average of one set a year is born.
But this is also the story of their parents - Sandy and Tony Taylor, who desperately wanted a child. And who never dreamed they'd accomplish something rarer than winning the lottery.
Tony, 31, and Sandy, 30, had been married three years when the urge to have a baby hit. But despite two successful pregnancies when she was younger, Sandy couldn't conceive because of blocked fallopian tubes.
An operation to remove the blockage might have corrected the problem, but the Taylors' insurance wouldn't cover it, Sandy said. But the policy did cover in-vitro fertilization.
So the Taylors went to the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk. There, doctors stimulated Sandy's ovaries to produce extra eggs, removed them and fertilized them with Tony's sperm in a petri dish.
On her first try, eight of Sandy's eggs fertilized, and four were returned to her womb.
Doctors told her she wouldn't carry all four to term, that at least one of the eggs wouldn't survive.
But Tony felt differently, and an ultrasound at eight weeks confirmed his gut feeling: four babies.
The chances of delivering four healthy babies, doctors knew, were rare. So they suggested a ``reduction,'' in which one or two babies are aborted. The Taylors refused.
``I can't make that choice,'' Sandy said. ``If there's going to be a reduction, it's going to be God's choice; not mine.''
And now, looking at the four plump babies arrayed on the couch around her, Sandy says: ``I can't wait to take these babies over there and parade them in front of that doctor and say to him: ``Which one should I have reduced?' ''
A quadruplet pregnancy is automatically classified as high-risk. Will all four babies survive? Will there be enough of a blood supply to ensure they get enough nutrients to grow?
And the biggie - will they survive long enough in the womb to make it outside?
Rarely does a woman carrying three or four babies make it the full 40 weeks of her pregnancy. The weight of four babies tricks the uterus into thinking the baby is full-term, and hence ready for delivery.
It happened to Sandy in her fourth month when she started bleeding.
Tony rushed her to the emergency room at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital where the ER doctor told her to go home and prepare to lose the babies.
Luckily, Sandy's doctor, Bonnie Dattel of Eastern Virginia Medical School, was in the hospital that day. She heard about the woman miscarrying quadruplets in the emergency room and ran down.
Dattel admitted Sandy to the hospital and was able to stop the labor with drugs and bed rest.
Sandy spent the the next month hospitalized, receiving insulin injections to control the gestational diabetes she'd developed and other drugs to stem off labor. She gained 90 pounds, which, on her big-boned body, she was able to handle. Still, she was so big she had to use a metal walker to support her bulging stomach when she walked.
Not until Sandy's 26th week, when Dattel knew the babies had a good chance of surviving outside the womb, did the doctor allow herself a smile over this unique pregnancy.
``You might just get to 30 weeks,'' she told her patient hopefully.
But a week later, 13 weeks before her due date, on Sept. 9, Sandy was in the operating room, surrounded by about 30 doctors and nurses, as the babies were delivered by Caesarean section - one by one by one by one.
The tiny babies - the largest weighing 2 pounds, 8 ounces - were rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit at Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters. But it was two days before Sandy saw them - hooked up to a ventilator, tubes and needles all over their bodies - through the wavy plastic of the incubators.
Thus began the hardest time of all.
Coming home to the small, two-bedroom townhouse in Churchland empty-handed; pumping her breast milk to the hum of a machine, instead of the sucking of an infant; traveling the 15 miles back and forth each day to visit the babies. Opening the bills that poured in from the hospitals - totaling nearly $1 million in the end.
``And don't forget,'' Tony reminds with a pained look on his face. ``She also had postpartum depression times four.''
The first baby to come home was Tatianah - on Halloween. It was appropriate, says Tony. ``She's always hollerin'.''
Next was Breanah on Nov. 12, then Shareef, on Thanksgiving.
And on Dec. 27, Tyreef, the only quad who had required any surgery, came home, still with a gastric tube sticking out of his stomach.
And reality hit.
The living room is the command post in the Taylor household: four swings extending into the adjoining dining area, a playpen with four gingerbread dolls, four baby seats strung along the couch like a necklace. In the refrigerator are the day's bottles - 27 of them.
Having quadruplets is so challenging that the state gives their parents handicapped stickers for their cars.
The Taylors will take all the help they can get - even if it's just a piece of paper that saves them a few steps to the store.
The family is far from rich. Sandy quit her job as a receiving clerk at Doughtie's Foods Inc., during her pregnancy. She can't go back to work because day care would cost more than her paycheck would bring. Tony works nights there as a forklift operator.
While she was still in the hospital, Sandy wrote to every baby manufacturer she could think of asking for help. The diaper companies sent free coupons; Carter's sent sleepers; Gerber's sent cases of formula, baby food, undershirts and even four feeding spoons engraved with the babies' names.
Sandy signed on with WIC, the government program that provides formula and other groceries for women with children under 5. And the family was able to get Medicaid to supplement Tony's medical insurance. Sandy's two children from a previous marriage live with their father in Florida.
But the expenses have just begun. Within a year, the Taylors will need a bigger house. Even now, Sandy is worried about how she'll fit two more cribs in the nursery. Where she'll get four high chairs. How to afford the $500 quadruple stroller she wants to order.
``We'll just take it one day at a time,'' says Tony, balancing a baby on each of his massive forearms.
It's a sanguine view of life that appalls one expert in multiple births.
``The real cost of triplets and quads has to be considered in terms of the emotional cost on this family's life,'' says Dr. Louis Keith, president for the Center for the Study of Multiple Births at Northwestern University Medical School outside of Chicago.
``It will never be the same again.''
Told the Taylors are doing it alone, with no help in their home, he warns that they are at risk of becoming depressed, frustrated or angry.
``She needs help,'' he said simply.
Sandy just shrugs off this concern. ``I put myself in a state of mind like I'm running a nursery or baby-sitting. The only thing is the kids don't go anywhere.''
And neither does she. Her world has shrunk to this living room.
She's learned to sleep when they sleep. To take advantage of the rare times three of the four are sleeping to cuddle the fourth; or when all four are happily swinging to vacuum the living room, run a sponge over the sticky kitchen counters, boil their pacifiers and glass bottles.
But eventually, she and Tony encounter the inevitable. They have to go out into the world with four babies. Like to the pediatrician's for a four-month check-up.
It is the coldest day of the year. So cold that Tony drives the family's new van - now a necessity instead of a luxury - right up to the front door.
It's taken half an hour to get the babies ready. To put on two pink and two blue snowsuits. Four hats. To load the diaper bag with the four bottles, eight diapers, two receiving blankets (for spit-up cloths) and wipes they'll need for this outing. One by one, working on an assembly line mentality, the babies in their car seats are handed out the door and up into the van.
At the busy medical building in downtown Norfolk, people stare at the parade of babies.
``You got twins?'' asks one woman as she sees Tony carrying two babies. Then she sees the other two and her jaw drops. ``Four? You got four babies?''
The news that a woman has had four babies - at one time! - spreads like wildfire through the building, and soon dozens of patients and staff and are clustered around the door peering in at the quads.
``Oooohhh, good gracious,'' says one woman to Sandy. ``I take my hat off to you.''
``You usually see that in the other color,'' says one woman. ``It's good to see them in our color.''
The pediatrician, Ogu Emejuru, exits an examining room and nearly trips over the line of babies at his feet. ``Well,'' he says. ``Here they finally all are.''
These are the first quads he's ever cared for, but he and his nurses jump smoothly into this quadruplet office visit.
One by one, Emejuru plucks a baby from its parent's arms, strips it, examines it, then hands it back.
They've all gained weight - weighing between 8 pounds, 1 ounce (Tareef) and 10 pounds, 7 ounces (Tatianah) - and they're all pretty healthy.
He reels off a checklist of advice for Sandy, ensures that her next appointment will be at his Greenbrier office - where he's got more room - and then, as every good pediatrician does, beats a hasty exit, leaving his nurses to deliver the dreaded shots.
They place the babies side by side on the examining table, and with swift efficiency, plunge needle after needle after needle after needle into the small thighs.
The room erupts with cries, and six arms reach out to soothe the four babies.
And then it's snowsuits, car seats, hats and blankets again. The trek back down the hall of open-mouthed observers (``Look, quad-triplets!''), and the loading 'em up again in the van.
There's one good thing about this two-hour visit in the overheated, crowded doctor's office, thinks Sandy as Tony heads back toward Portsmouth.
Between the shots, the handling and the Tylenol drops, the babies are exhausted. They'll probably sleep for a couple of hours.
And so will she. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
PAUL AIKEN/Staff
Above: Sandy Taylor feeds Tatianah and Tyreef while Breanah and
Shareef doze.
Right: Tony gets the babies ready to go out.
PAUL AIKEN/Staff
Sandy and Tony Taylor are managing on their own. ``I put myself in a
state of mind like I'm running a nursery or baby-sitting,'' says
Sandy. ``The only thing is the kids don't go anywhere.''
KEYWORDS: MULTIPLE BIRTHS IN-VITRO FERTILIZATION QUADRUPLETS by CNB