'Honey, there's actually four babies': Mum pregnant with two separate sets of twins at same time
By Madhurima Haque|
Ashley Ness walked into her gynecologist's office in February expecting to top up her birth control prescription. Instead, she found out she was pregnant.
It wouldn't be until two weeks later that the US mum learned there were four babies in her womb - but they weren't quadruplets.
Ness, 35, recounts the ultrasound technician having to step away from the room for a second while doing her initial ultrasound.
"I'm now in the room by myself panicking, like, 'What's going on? What did she see?'" Ness told PEOPLE.
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"I felt like it was 20 minutes. It could have been an hour... Then she comes back in, and she was like, 'Did you tell anybody you were having twins?' And I was like, 'Why?' She said, 'Can you just hold off on telling people?'"
"So she starts the ultrasound back up...And she goes, 'Honey, there's actually four babies in here.'"
"I had to step out of the room to Google it to make sure," Ness recalled the technician told her.
Further investigation determined it wasn't just four babies in her womb. Ness had four babies in two different placenta, meaning she was pregnant with two separate sets of twins at the same time.
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Dr Ahmet Baschat, director of the Center for Fetal Therapy and a professor in the Johns Hopkins Medicine Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, tells PEOPLE the pregnancy is "one in 10 million".
According to Baschat, the rarity occurs when two eggs are fertilised at the same time, and each fertilised egg divides again. Each egg, although split, remains in its own placenta, creating two sets of identical twins. In a traditional quadruplet pregnancy, there would be four individually fertilised eggs encased separately.
"If she were playing the lottery, if she's this lucky, she would be very rich," he joked.
At the same time, he admits, "It's a high-risk pregnancy... We see a lot of rare stuff, but this is the first time I'm hearing this in my entire career."
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According to their GoFundMe page, which friends helped set up, Ness's babies will be delivered mid-August despite being due in October, for the health and wellbeing of the mum and the babies.
Ness, who is now 24 weeks pregnant, says her doctors have discussed having a C-section at 30-32 weeks, "but not past it, just because then they feel the risk just gets higher."
Ness's fetal-medicine specialists at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston have also revealed that one set of twins will be male, the other female, a fact that doesn't exactly bring the mum-to-be any more comfort.
"I was like, 'Oh man, I'm going to mix them up. I'm going to forget who's who. They're going to play tricks on me. This is going to be crazy," she said.
