Parents wish for ‘miracle’ for five pre-term babies
The Kempels started celebrating Christmas over the weekend — more than two weeks early — but they’re hoping to wait until the new year for the present everyone wants: five healthy babies who they pray aren’t too anxious to leave the womb.
The countdown for the Kempel quintuplets has reached 23 weeks and, on Monday, Amy Kempel is scheduled to check in to the hospital for what the Mountain House couple hopes is a lengthy bed rest so the babies aren’t born too early.
It’s not the hospital where they had hoped to be delivering Lincoln, Grayson, Preston, Noelle and Gabriella when they told their story last month to
the Bay Area News Group. Amy and Chad Kempel had been begging Kaiser Permanente to send them to an out-of-network doctor in Arizona who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, but Kaiser denied their appeals saying its doctors are qualified to care for Amy and her babies.
So on Monday, with comfy pajamas and an iPad in tow, Amy, 34, and Chad, 36, are set to make their way to the Walnut Creek medical center where, barring a “Christmas miracle,” Chad acknowledged, she will deliver the babies.
“I really do wish I could say we are at home packing our bags for Arizona,” he said Friday afternoon, “but that is not the case.”
Everything feels like a race against the clock.
Running out of time
At 23 weeks along, Amy has made it a week longer than she did in 2013, when the couple lost their twins, Marshall and Spencer. Amy has what’s known as an incompetent cervix, which caused the twins to be born too early to survive. On holidays, the family goes to visit their graves in Hayward and desperately wants to avoid adding more.
But now, as Amy heads into what they pray will be weeks and weeks of bed rest, the pair are terrified the same fate will befall their quintuplets — three boys and two girls.
The fertility doctor warned them they could have twins, even triplets,
when the used a procedure known as intrauterine insemination to get pregnant. It’s the same treatment the Kempels used when Amy got pregnant with their children Savannah, now 3, and Avery, 18 months.
Running into a wall with Kaiser, the pair have tried writing to local lawmakers and even President Donald Trump for help.
But while they’ve gotten some sympathy, their pleas have so far not generated any action and Amy is running out of time. Even now, traveling
could be risky.
Typical pregnancies last around 40 weeks, but the average for quintuplets is around 27 weeks. Babies born that early are at a greater risk of having lifelong complications, and Amy and Chad hope their quintuplets will stay inside Amy well past that mark. The doctor they’d like to see in Arizona, John Elliott, says he regularly gets quintuplet pregnancies to 33 weeks, when babies are much more likely to be healthy.
In preparation for the worst, the couple scheduled
a 3D ultrasound for over the weekend to get 3D video of the babies.
“Not knowing what was in our future with the twins, we went to the same ultrasound place in 2013 and now that video, although sad, is what we have left of them,” Chad said.
Between packing for the hospital and trying to find daycare for their younger daughter — since Amy won’t be home to take care of her like she usually does — the family also picked up a little $20 Christmas tree at Safeway and hung some decorations over the weekend, a stab at normalcy during a holiday season that is anything but ordinary.
‘I will keep fighting’
Amy won’t be there when the girls wake up Christmas morning, but Chad is hoping to bring them to the hospital to see their mom as much as possible. One hotel nearby has even offered the family complimentary rooms whenever they have weekend availability. And family and friends have stepped forward with meals and online fundraising campaigns.
The generosity, Chad said, has given him space to keep pushing for permission to go to Arizona, however futile that fight might be at this point.
“Until she is no longer movable, I will keep fighting,” he said. “Most of our family and friends think that the fight is over, but I am going to go down swinging.”