Heather Carroll is an awfully small woman to carry six babies, especially all at once and in her belly. The mother revealed how she had to consume 6,000 calories each day just to keep them nourished.
Looking ecstatic but exhausted, Heather Carroll, who is just 5’2″ tall, said the tiny babies – five girls and a boy – all ‘look wonderful’. She gained an extra 35lbs during her pregnancy, a weight she could barely carry.
Abbie, Brooklyn, Chloe, David, Ellie, and Faith are the six children she and her husband Mitchell have named alphabetically after the letters physicians assigned to them while they were still in the womb: Abbie, Brooklyn, Chloe, David, Ellie, and Faith.
She gave birth to the sextuplets by planned Caesarian section on 28 weeks and one day into her pregnancy, after a month of strict bed rest – including her 30th birthday.
They arrived in the space of just three minutes, the eldest, Abbie, at 8.05am and the youngest, Faith, at 8.08am, and weighed between 1lb 10oz and 2lbs 5oz.
A team of 51 medical personnel welcomed the babies into the world, having practiced the delivery six times beforehand. Each newborn was looked after by its own team of doctors and nurses.
The 30-year-old provoked laughter from the assembled press as she described her 6,000 calorie-a-day diet. She said: ‘It was very hard. They had me keep a sheet of everything I ate, and they would always do the calories for it.
‘And all of the snacks, every day they would start bring me snack foods and desserts. I mean, it was very good, but I can’t imagine doing that again.’
The week before she gave birth, she said she could feel exactly where each of the babies were sitting: one on each hip, three lower down on her pelvis and another which moved up and down.
The couple had struggled for years to have children, and Mrs Carroll had four miscarriages before being diagnosed with polycystic ovaries.
Mrs Carroll had Grant through intrauterine insemination, which involved her taking fertility medicines to increase her own egg production before her husband’s sperm was inserted straight into her uterus.
She went through the same process for her next pregnancy. It can sometimes result in twins or triplets – but rarely sextuplets.
Once the shock wore off, Mrs Carroll said she just started crying. She said: ‘All I could think about was, “how are we going to take care of six babies?” because we had a hard enough time with our first.’
Their close-knit neighborhood has already come together to support them. Friends have begun extending their log home, local businesses have offered diapers and formula milk, and a car dealership has offered to donate a van.
A month before the babies were born, Mrs Carroll was admitted to Brockwood Medical Center for round-the-clock monitoring.
She drank a nutrient-packed milkshake with every meal and was given extra supplements using an IV drip to make sure she consumed enough calories to keep the babies healthy.
For the last few days, she was experiencing regular contractions and had to take medication to stop the babies coming too soon.
Doctors said their chance of survival grew by four per cent every day they stayed in the womb, allowing their organs to develop.
‘It’s just a really unusual demand on a woman’s body, and she’s a little hiccup of a girl,’ Dr McKenzie explained. ‘However, she has a huge heart.’
Mr Carroll spent the day racing from incubator to incubator, wearing five pink ID bands and one blue ID band to demonstrate he could visit the infants.
He said he was ‘on top of the world’ in an interview with the Birmingham News. ‘Everything this morning was fantastic,’ he said.
In a statement, Dr McKenzie said: ‘Heather and Mitchell Carroll were committed to this journey, their family and community were supportive, and God was faithful.‘
I am so proud of this mother’s toughness and appreciative for the excellent preparation and care she received at Brookwood Medical Center.’
