Rare triplets born at Mountain View Hospital
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI)- A Rexburg couple had Christmas come early this year, in the form of identical triplet girls.
Olivia and Connor Gressel welcomed Lina, Jane, and Marceline (Marcy) on December 20, more than two months ahead of their original due date of February 27.
The girls are the first-ever set of triplets born at Mountain View Hospital in Idaho Falls, but that's not the only thing that sets them apart.
Olivia's doctor, OBGYN Dr. Pamela Denson says that the odds of getting pregnant with triplets in the first place is about 1 in 5,000, and that's with the help of fertility treatments like IVF.
Olivia also had an IUD and multiples don't run in either her's or Connor's families.
This makes the girls extremely rare mono tri triplets.
"They each share the same placenta, but they're each in their own individual sac," Denson said. "I mean, the chance of that is about 1 in 100,000 in itself. And then add the chance of getting pregnant just with an IUD. I mean, it's kind of crazy. The probability of getting pregnant with mono tri triplets, where they're all sharing the same placenta and they're identical with an IUD is somewhere around 1 in 10 million. So I told her she needs to go to Vegas."
Born more than two months early, the girls are in the NICU at Mountain View Hospital, and Olivia says they're doing great.
"They're doing really good from what the doctors have told us, they're doing better than they would have expected, which is so relieving for us," Olivia and Connor said.
Olivia had been seeing a specialist, as well as Dr. Denson once a week, and went in for a routine checkup Monday.
"I just mentioned it to her, 'Hey, I've just been having this pain'," Olivia said. "And she said, 'Oh, well, we should, we should check you.' And she did, and I had dilated to like a three, and she's like, 'Oh, OK, well, let's put you in the hospital because you're going to have these babies and we just want everything to be safe'. So she said, 'We'll just check you in until you have them.' And that was a huge surprise."
Doctors planned on keeping Olivia until Wednesday, but about an hour later when she was checked on again, they saw she had dilated more, and decided to perform a C-section.
Dad Connor said the girls are already developing personalities.
"Jane, we thought she was kind of the more submissive one in the womb, she was getting kicked a whole time by Marcy and Lina and so we kind of assumed she was going to be the more docile one," Connor said. "And even when they came out, we saw that Marceline, she would kick really hard. And so we're like, 'Oh, yeah, she's a fighter'. She's definitely the aggressor in this case. But then one of the nurses just told us today that Jane's actually been pretty aggressive and kind of being a little feisty. So that was a little surprising because we thought she was so sweet, like 'Our Jane, are you sure?' And so we've kind of noticed a little bit of personality there. Lina has just been calm as much as you can be."
