Photo:Emma Montgomery
Emma Montgomery
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Courtesy Stewart Family
“We decided, ‘We’re just going to give it our best shot.’ So I ended up going back to the fertility doctor after we were married and we’d been trying on our own for a year and a half.”
The couple were eventually recommended in-vitro fertilization (IVF), but ended up trying intrauterine insemination (IUI) first, conceiving Bennett on the second try.
The couple turned back to IUI, undergoing the process five times without success before turning their sights to IVF.
She adds, “People would ask me all the time, ‘What’s the point where you’re just done? How many losses — three losses, is that enough for you? You used all your embryos.’ And we both felt like we just weren’t done yet.”
“We took that as our sign to go with two, a boy and a girl, and whichever one we got we’d be completely happy with. On the off chance that we get two, then we were meant to have three kids.”
“At this point, I was devastated. I thought, ‘This cannot be happening. This is my fourth transfer. There is no freaking way I’m having a fourth miscarriage.’ "
“I didn’t feel like I was miscarrying. And one of my favorite nurses did the ultrasound. We have a video of it. I’m lying there and she pulls up three perfect little sacs. We’re all quiet and she’s like, ‘How many embryos did you transfer again?’ We’re all just looking at it and I’m like, ‘Get my doctor in here right now.’ "
“My doctor is the best and she called me back very quickly. I remember she was the first person who said, ‘How are you feeling about this? You can do this, you worked so hard for this,'” she notes. “Because everybody in our life was so excited about the babies because we’ve worked so hard for it that no one had asked. And I was freaking terrified.”
“A lot of people will joke with us and say they wish they could have triplets, but they don’t understand how very high risk it is when you have multiples. Every number you go up, it gets scarier because they’re guaranteed to be born premature and every time you go to the doctor, you’re just hoping to make it to the next milestone,” the father of four notes.
“Every time we went to the doctor and had to ask, ‘If we had to deliver next week would they survive?’ You have to go through that every time, you’re just constantly stressed about it.”
“It wasn’t something they were really expecting to happen, so my recovery was a lot slower [than we thought]. We get home with the babies and every single time someone came to meet them, they would say, ‘I thought your girls were identical.’”
The more visitors they got, the more they heard that Etta and Margot did not look alike.
“They’d say, ‘Well they put a third embryo in.’ And that’s one thing I will say, people who haven’t gone through IVF or infertility throw things out like that, not understanding the repercussions. You don’t understand how that works, and also you don’t understand what that means if that’s actually true. What you’re just saying to me in jest is not a joke,” she says.
“A lot of people think when we talk about the DNA testing, that we were trying to catch our fertility clinic in something, which was not the case. We wanted to know more for the girls themselves so that they had their identity and knew what happened and how they came to be,” Chase shares. “We think that’s important.”
“I told her what was going on. She’s like, ‘Let’s just go through all of the super obvious things’ and she was amazing with me,” she shares, explaining that the counselor also offered to consult colleagues to help the confused couple get their answers.“She got back to me and was like, ‘None of us have had this happen before. Here’s what we’ve come up with.’ We went through the list together and basically disregarded most of them right off the bat. All our babies are healthy. All our babies have the correct genitalia. We came to the fact that either I did get naturally pregnant or there was the presence of a third embryo.”
The couple and their clinic each independently verified they had the correct number of embryos remaining in storage, which led them to ask when the couple was last intimate before the procedure.
“While we were doing the shots and everything to prepare for a transfer, I had a small follicle, which was weird because I don’t grow my own follicles. I don’t ovulate on my own. We did an ultrasound for it and they were ‘You’re doing a medicated frozen embryo cycle, so that prevents you from ovulating. You’re fine.'”
To shore up the theory, the genetic testing facility that tested the embryos before the couple transferred two was asked to see if there was any more genetic samples from the couple’s embryos to pull a DNA profile for the girl embryo that was transferred.
“That specimen is only a couple of cells,” she explains, noting the couple had to pay out of pocket to test them with a 20 percent chance of success.
That bond continues to this day, as the triplets — now toddlers — enjoy every moment they’re together.
“They sleep in the same room and they kiss each other good night. They do fight, they’re 2, but they’re a little gang,” she says. “They couldn’t have come earlier. It couldn’t have been Etta, then Garner, then Margot. They had to come at the same time because they had to be together, which is really comforting to me in the moments that having four kids is hard.”
The couple is thankful to have some help from big sister Bennett.
“We didn’t realize how lucky we were to have Bennett’s personality as our oldest until the triplets. She went through infertility with us. She saw me miscarry during our third miscarriage. And once the triplets came home, she called them her babies. She’s never really jealous and always wants to be involved. And she worked hard for them too.”
“I found those people on Instagram, this whole triplet community and it was so amazing to me. I want to be that for other people. Moms reach out that are pregnant with triplets and feel scared and alone and I am so grateful to be able to pay it forward, to be that person for somebody else.”
And while they navigate the ups and downs of four children, they do so with immense gratitude for the journey that brought them here.“I think the hard thing is you have to commit to being very regimented and scheduled with multiples because you can’t afford to miss a nap with one and then none of them sleep. You have to be very strict. But they’re such awesome kids. We work hard to intentionally make each of them feel important and not always refer to them as the triplets, as a single unit,” Chase says.
source: people.com
