Katelyn Yates went to the hospital expecting to have her tonsils removed. She found out she was pregnant with quadruplets.
The odds of conceiving spontaneous quadruplets are less than one in 500,000, according to the Journal of Family and Reproductive Health.
Yates, a 20-year-old nursing assistant from Illinois, thought her doctor was playing a prank when she announced on April Fool’s Day that she was pregnant with four babies.
“I was in a state of total surprise,” Yates told .
After all, he had gone to the emergency room with a sore throat.
After determining that Yates needed an x-ray to find out the cause of the sore throat, they gave her a pregnancy test. Fetuses are more sensitive to radiation than adults.
Not only did the test come back positive, but Yates said his human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) levels They were “over the roof”. HCG is a hormone produced by the placenta during pregnancy.
At the time, Yates and her now fiancé, Julian Bueker, 21, had been dating for only six months.
“I was very excited,” Yates said, stating that his reaction made her feel calmer.
Yates’ pregnancy was not easy. She was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a serious blood pressure condition, and during her third trimester her liver and kidneys began to fail.
“I couldn’t breathe on my own”he explained.
When Yates was 28 weeks and 4 days old, doctors performed a cesarean section.
Elizabeth Taylor, Max Ashton, Elliot Ryker and Zya Grace were born on October 17 at HSHS St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Illinois. Max and Elliot are identical twins.
The smallest baby was Elizabeth, who weighed 1 pound, 2 ounces; while Max, the oldest of all, weighed 2 pounds and 6 ounces.
“They are very good. They are gaining weight and growing“Yates said. “Elizabeth is about six grams away from hitting two pounds.”
“It’s amazing to me how good they are,” he said. “Just a few weeks ago, they were the size of my hand.”
Yates is trying to raise money through donations to help support his family; On the Venmo platform she appears as “katelyn yates 40”.
Dr. Meghana Limaye, MD, a Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at NYU Langone Health, called the birth of the spontaneous quadruplets an “incredibly rare situation.”
“There were only 148 quadruplet births or higher order multiples in the United States in 2021,” Limaye, who did not treat Yates, previously told .
