After seven difficult years of battling unexplained infertility, a Laurentian couple suddenly found themselves with triplets.
“Even today, there are times when we cradle the children and say to ourselves: “Yes, we have three!” says Stéphanie Spidalieri, from Brébeuf, in the Laurentians, laughing.
Three spontaneous abortions
The 33-year-old, who gave birth to triplets in March, is still struggling with the realization. She and her partner had been trying to have a child for seven years and had gone through three heartbreaking miscarriages.
“The project was failing,” he breathes, after a difficult year, marked by the death of his sister and niece in a traffic accident. The couple was not considering fertility treatments or in vitro fertilization.
And even after the announcement of a positive pregnancy test, Mme Spidalieri kept a cool head. “We were not alarmed,” he said, although he feared another disappointment.
Then came the announcement of the triplets at the first ultrasound. “Everyone had their apartment in the same block,” he laughs about the three different eggs.
“It was a shock. You see that in the movies! says Éric Pilon in turn. The father-to-be then traded in his truck for a Dodge Caravan.
What awaited the couple only became reality after 25 weeks of pregnancy, when the babies became viable. They had also refused embryo reduction, to remove one or two fetuses, because they did not want to take any risks even if the pregnancy remained riskier.
Stephanie Spidalieri finally gave birth at 34 weeks to three babies weighing four and a half pounds. “There are three of them, healthy, I couldn’t ask for anything better,” she rejoices.
A boy and two girls, Xavyer, Julyette and Elyrose, united by the letter Y, which their mother saw as the symbol for three.
However, the task is colossal for new parents.
“We change 900 diapers a month, about 100 bottles a week,” says Mme Spidalieri, who regrets the little help, both financial and physical, offered to parents in his situation.
“If you don’t have people around you, you’re not going to make it,” she believes, adding that her mother comes to help her every day. “We are lucky to have sponsors,” Pilon adds of the family and friends who take turns helping them.
Rampant inflation also worries the couple, who see expenses skyrocket. They will soon need not one, but three new child safety seats, for example.
“It changes your life from beginning to end, but it is also the most beautiful thing that could have happened to us,” says the father of the triplets.
Multiple pregnancies, with more than three children, represent only 3% of births in Quebec.
