‘I GAVE BIRTH TO TRIPLETS… IN A COMA!’
MOTHER’S INTUITION SAVED LEONIE AND HER THREE BABIES’ LIVES
Leonie Fitzgerald was excitedly attending her much-longedfor seven-week baby scan. But when she saw the look on the sonographer’s face, it made her heart lurch.
“I thought, ‘Oh God, not again,’” she recalls.
Leonie and her husband, Pete, had already suffered four miscarriages. After three gruelling rounds of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), they’d decided that this would be the last.
“We’d lost a pregnancy a few months before. It was a very challenging time,” Leonie recalls.
Neither of them were prepared for what the sonographer was about to say – they were having triplets!
“I looked at my husband and we just started laughing because we’d been trying so hard to get one!” says Leonie.
Now 47, Leonie and Pete, 52, had been trying to conceive for almost six years. They’d spent $100,000 on IVF and a range of natural therapies.
They were delighted to be expecting three precious babies. But Leonie’s history of miscarriages and her age, combined with the fact she was carrying multiples, made the pregnancy very high risk.
“Pretty much from the day I found out I was having triplets, my IVF specialist strongly recommended that I go on immediate bed rest.”
Their goal was to get the triplets to 33 weeks gestation.
But Leonie, then 45, was admitted into Mater Mothers’ Private Brisbane a day before her scheduled caesarean section as a precaution because she felt “something wasn’t right”.
“I just felt like I needed to be in hospital. And I can’t tell you why. I just did.”
Leonie’s intuition saved their lives as four hours later, while nurses were checking the babies’ hearts with a doppler, Leonie had a seizure.
“All of a sudden I said to Pete, ‘Something’s not right.’ I heard him shout, ‘Do something!’ I don’t remember anything after that. They pressed the emergency button on the wall and raced me down to theatre.”
There was no time for an epidural – Leonie was under general anaesthetic for the emergency caesarean and kept in a coma for the next 16 hours.
“They didn’t know if I’d had an epileptic fit, or if my brain was bleeding. They had to keep me under so they could do some tests and have a look at what was going on.”
Twenty-one minutes after Leonie had her seizure, at 9.16pm on August 23, 2020,
‘THE FIRST THING I REMEMBER IS BEING WHEELED UP TO SEE THE GIRLS’
the triplets were born – seven weeks early. Liliana was 1.19kg, Charlotte 1.92kg and Isabella was 1.59kg.
“As soon as they were delivered, they put them into a plastic bag to keep them warm. It was a pretty scary situation for Pete. They didn’t know if I was going to have any brain damage until I woke up.”
Leonie’s heart was enlarged because of the seizure, which had been brought on by eclampsia – caused by high blood pressure in pregnancy. Leonie says she had no symptoms of the rare but serious condition. It wasn’t until her babies were two days old that Leonie was finally well enough to meet them.
“The first thing I remember
is them wheeling me up in the bed to see the girls. I was still very groggy and attached to heart monitoring machines.
“It was quite intense in the Neonatal Critical Care Unit. There’s lots of beeping, monitors, alarms going off, staff in and out. The girls had feeding tubes down their throats. They had cables attached to their feet, monitoring their pulse and their blood pressure.
“I remember this nurse was holding my baby up in the air while another nurse was trying to move all the cables on my chest so she could put her down. This poor little thing was crying her eyes out.
“But skin on skin is so powerful. As soon as the girls were placed on my chest, they stopped crying and that was a pretty magical experience. They knew who mum was.”
Leonie spent two weeks recovering in hospital. Liliana, Charlotte and Isabella spent more than a month in intensive care before their proud parents were able to take them home.
“It was pretty hectic from day one because they were feeding every three hours and we were going through 35 nappies and 24 bottles a day.”
Now, the girls are running around cuddling each other and chasing the family dog, Belle.
“It’s quite amazing to watch them interact. Sometimes I’ll hide around the corner and just watch them.
“We will forever be grateful to the doctors and nurses who saved all of us,” she adds.