The now mother of five keeps thousands of Instagram
followers entertained with updates about her life with Zoe and her
eight month old quadruplets, Ava, Madelyn, Olivia and Victor. She said,
“I feel so lucky when I look at my children because I never thought this
would happen to me. It hasn’t been your typical journey into
parenthood, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Virginia
and Victor tried for years to conceive before falling pregnant. But
their joy was short lived as they discovered the pregnancy was ectopic
and would have to be terminated. It was only when doctors conducted a
scan to monitor the pregnancy that the malignant tumor in Virginia’s
bladder was detected. If the pregnancy had not been ectopic, doctors
believe the cancer would have most likely gone undetected and might have
spread throughout her body.
Virginia
said, “When doctors discovered the cancer I was so broken. After trying
to have a baby for long, we were just so incredibly happy to have
conceived naturally. And then boom: two weeks later it was all taken
away from us. I was incredibly angry and severely depressed. It took me a
long time to realize that the ectopic pregnancy happened for a reason.
It was like my body saying: “Don’t worry, you are going to be a mum but
not yet, your body isn’t ready, let’s beat this cancer first”.’
Virginia
had the tumor removed and her remaining Fallopian tube in November 2013
to stop the cancer spreading, eliminating the couple’s remaining hope
of conceiving naturally. But just a month later they started IVF,
determined to start a family. Virginia revealed the swift dive into IVF
was ‘a coping mechanism’ and a way to ‘numb the pain’ of the couple’s
loss a month earlier. Shortly after they discovered it had been
successful and a year later they welcomed daughter Zoey.
After
an ‘incredible’ year and a half of being parents, Virginia said she
felt like she wanted to have another child. Following an unsuccessful
round of IVF, the parents discovered they were having twins. A week
later they discovered one of the embryos had split in two and that they
would have triplets. Two weeks after that, they were given the news that
two babies were sharing one sac and she was actually carrying
quadruplets – three identical girls and a boy.
Virginia
said, “It was such an emotional rollercoaster. I went from being
excited for twins, to being overwhelmed at the idea of triplets and then
being completely gob smacked that I was pregnant with quadruplets. Straight
away, my doctors warned me about the dangers of carrying quads and
asked me to consider “selective reduction”, meaning to abort one or more
of the babies. But that was never an option for me or my husband.”
Virginia
carried her quadruplets to 32 weeks before a scheduled caesarean
section, where all babies were delivered safely. Six weeks later, the
family came home. She said, “It was incredibly chaotic bringing them
home. You can’t imagine the crying and the running around for each baby
and, of course, still taking care of Zoey. We hardly got any sleep and
were awake every three hours for bottle feeds. It’s hard enough with one
newborn but with quads it’s four times as demanding. But I also feel
four times as blessed. We’re so lucky that we have such a good support
system here and we do get a lot of help.”
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