A woman who suffered two miscarriages before getting pregnant for the third time was “shocked” to discover she was having rare triplets.
Natasha O'Grady, 34, and her husband, Ryan, 36, were expecting bad news for the third time when they went in for their first scan.
“I‘d been suffering really badly from depression from the two miscarriages, and I was still having therapy, and it was on the last day of my therapy I found out I was pregnant again,” Ms. O’Grady, a content creator from Surrey, South East England, said. “When we went in there, I couldn’t even watch the monitor as I was preparing for bad news. The lady said ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but someone up there wants you to be a mom as there’s three heartbeats.’”
Shocked and bewildered, the parents kept questioning the news.
“We went for a walk to clear our heads, and they refer to babies born after miscarries as rainbow babies, and there was a rainbow at the end of the walk, which was bizarre,” Ms. O'Grady said. “Until we physically had them here, no one thought it was going to happen.”
Ms. O'Grady’s pregnancy was a trichorionic pregnancy, meaning all three babies had their own placenta, and it was considered to be very rare.
“The doctor told us that we‘d be advised to reduce the pregnancy, which is where they terminate one of the babies so the others have a higher risk of surviving,” Ms. O’Grady said. “I knew from the start there was no way I was going to be doing anything like that.”
Ms. O‘Grady said they saw the triple pregnancy as “like we’d got all our babies back from previous miscarriages” and thus rejected advice to terminate one baby.
After a “stressful” pregnancy, Ms. O'Grady was admitted to St Mary’s Hospital on May 4, 2021, where she delivered all three babies the following day by cesarean section.
Siblings Quinn, Onyx, and Maddox each weighed 3 pounds and spent the next two weeks in the hospital.
“The pregnancy was completely natural and two [Onyx and Maddox] are identical—but they’ve all got bright blue eyes so none of them look like me!” Ms. O'Grady said.
The couple has had to change cars and move houses to accommodate three new arrivals.
“So many things cater towards twins, but not triplets,” Ms. O'Grady said. “The last house had two beds, but the second bedroom wasn’t big enough to house three cots.”
Now three years in, Ms. O'Grady is sharing her experience of navigating life with the triplets. When they were just little babies, the couple would get through 21 nappies in a day and now they do about 14 loads of laundry a week.
For Ms. O'Grady, it’s been hard, and she’s constantly toying with trying to survive with three toddlers and feels like she never has enough time.
“I’m navigating being a first-time mom and a last-time mom, and that’s been difficult,” she said. “I’m learning, and that’s it, there’s no second go.”
“It’s a lot of pressure, and I know it’s only one-time round,” she said.
Since the triplets have grown to be toddlers, Ms. O'Grady has had to constantly clean their mess—they’re now affectionately known as the “triplet tornado.”
She jokes that she needs to get a cow for the amount of milk that’s consumed in the house.
“Even now, we make breakfast on the weekend, and we use all the big cartons of eggs,” she said. “It’s how we used to buy food for just two people to suddenly have to buy for a family of five overnight.”
Although the last two years have been “wild,” Ms. O'Grady describes her triplets as “three very strong girls.”
