NEED TO KNOW
Hannah Merton and her husband tried for a baby for two years before getting pregnant with quintuplets
In an exclusive conversation with PEOPLE, she details her children’s premature birth and the various health scares her children endured over the next year
Merton, who now has close to 700,000 followers on TikTok, says of her account: “I’m just trying to grow a community — moms supporting moms is my goal”
Hannah Merton still remembers her doctor’s reaction when her week five ultrasound revealed she was pregnant with quintuplets.
“Her face just went completely white,” Merton tells PEOPLE. “She had to pull a stool out from behind her, she sits down, and she reaches over and touches my arm and says, ‘I think I see four or five.’ ”
“I’m like, ‘Four or five what? What are you talking about? Ain’t no way you’re talking about four or five babies,’ ” Merton remembers. “I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it.”
But at subsequent ultrasounds as her pregnancy progressed, it was true: there were “five strong heartbeats.”
Continues Merton: “We had to put our trust in God. We wanted to move forward with the pregnancy. We wanted to have all five of them.”
Merton married her husband when she was 18, and they always knew they wanted to have children. But they tried for two years and “it just wasn’t happening,” she says. After she was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, she visited a doctor who put her on medication to help with her fertility. Shortly after, she became pregnant with quintuplets.
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Her pregnancy was anything but easy. At 23 weeks, while at a routine ultrasound, doctors told Merton that her cervix had thinned considerably and immediately admitted her to the hospital. While there, she started having contractions, though her doctors were able to stop labor and send her home.
But a week later, Merton began to have contractions again, and doctors told her there was nothing they could do to stop her from giving birth early.
“I think there were 100 people,” remembers Merton of the delivery room — including a team of doctors for each baby. “It was insane.”
Related: Quintuplet Born at 8 Oz. — the Size of a Large Apple — Goes Home Just in Time for His 1st Birthday
Hannah Merton
Hannah Merton
Because her children were born so prematurely — her biggest was 1 pound and 13 ounces, her smallest 1 pound and 4 ounces — they were all given breathing tubes and were immediately transferred to the children’s hospital, where they received around-the-clock care in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. But tragically, her littlest baby was diagnosed with a grade four brain bleed, and she died three days after she was born.
“We couldn’t really mourn properly. As much as we wanted to just go home and not get out of bed for a week, we didn’t have a choice,” says Merton. “We had to show up at the hospital every day for our other kids.”
Over the next several months, several of Merton’s babies had health scares — sometimes bringing her and her husband into the hospital at 3 a.m. to respond to an emergency. After an ultrasound of her head, another of Merton’s daughters was found to have a brain bleed, which has caused her to have cerebral palsy. And one of Merton’s sons, while in the NICU, started having trouble breathing, so doctors placed a tracheostomy tube into his neck.
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But finally, over the course of the next year, Merton and her husband were able to bring her four babies home, one by one.
Related: Parents Who Had Quintuplets Last Year Welcome Baby Girl: ‘One Big Happy Family’ (Exclusive)
To make her pregnancy even more complicated, Merton gave birth in early 2020 — amid pandemic rules that restricted the number of visitors who could enter the hospital. But, she tells PEOPLE, the community’s response to her pregnancy was “the craziest thing.”
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Hannah Merton
Even before she gave birth, her town threw a baby shower for her — and the support continued over a year after she welcomed her children into the world.
“I did not have to buy diapers for the first year and a half that my kids were alive,” says Merton. “People gave us car seats, we got strollers, tons of clothes, baby toys — anything we needed.”
And she was growing a following online, too. Though she was “never a social media person,” she says she decided to share her story in the early weeks while her babies were still in the NICU.
“It wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to post this so I can go viral,’ ” says Merton. “I pick it up, and it has thousands and thousands of views and tons of people commenting. I’m like, ‘What is happening right now?’ ”
Today, Merton has grown her TikTok following to nearly 700,000 people, her babies are getting ready to head off to kindergarten, and she even has a new 1-year-old as well. She says she’s “trying to stay consistent on social media” to eventually save up for a new family car, since the one she has now can just barely fit her five kids.
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Hannah Merton
But the community she has found on social media has become so much more. “It really is amazing,” says Merton. “It feels so good to see that there are people who have consistently cared about me for this many years — they care about my family and they want to see me succeed.”
And she’s even had the opportunity to meet other moms of high-order multiples. In June, she and 18 other moms — all of whom have given birth to quadruplets — rented a house in Utah and spent the trip swapping stories and sharing advice.
Merton concludes: “I’m just trying to grow a community — moms supporting moms is my goal.”
Read the original article on People
