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MURRAY — Anthony Consolo temporarily lives in a hospital room; he sleeps on a cot and showers in the small bathroom too. Every moment he isn't at work, he's at Intermountain Medical Center with his wife, Natalie.
Anthony and Natalie already have a 22-month-old daughter. Any day now, their little family will transition from a family of three to a family of seven — a big change for a couple who has only been married three years.
"We are thrilled," Anthony told KSL News. "We see it as a blessing, a great opportunity to bring four babies into the world at the same time."
Quadruplet births are rare, but what makes this pregnancy more unusual is the couple did not use fertility aids.
Natalie, who wasn't feeling up to an interview Tuesday, is 32 weeks pregnant. She has been on bed rest for months now.
"It's not a small undertaking to embark on a quadruplet pregnancy," said Dr. Cara Heuser, Natalie's OB-GYN.
Quadruplet births are rare, but what makes this pregnancy more unusual is the couple did not use fertility aids.
Nationally, over 4 million babies were born in 2009; 355 of them were quadruplet births. That makes the probability of having quadruplets 1 in 500,000, and fertility aids were used in at least 90 percent of those multiple births.
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The Consolo quadruplets will be Heuser's second set at the hospital. The staff is monitoring Natalie closely because multiple births can be risky, to both the mother and the babies.
"It's difficult on the mom," Heuser said. "Natalie is very uncomfortable at this point, despite all our best efforts."
"We know the babies are going to be born healthy. They're going to be born strong. They have a fantastic mom that they're coming from," Anthony said. "Every day that they're in there is three days less that they'll spend in intensive care."
Four different ICU teams — one for each baby — will be there for the delivery to make sure everything goes OK.
