Mum-of-7 ‘couldn’t believe’ she was pregnant with ultra-rare quadruplets, 3 of which are identical (Exclusive)

HE NEEDS TO KNOW

• April Martinez and Shawnpail Fields of Jarrell, Texas, became parents to quadruplets Artemis, Curtis, Denahi and Eudora on July 13

• It is one of the rare cases where quadruplets were conceived naturally without fertility treatments

• “I just started crying. I couldn’t believe it,” Martinez told PEOPLE when a doctor told her she was pregnant with quads.

A Texas couple has achieved a feat that has been described as about 1 in a million: conceiving quadruplets naturally without fertility treatments.

In July, April Martinez and her husband Shawnpail Fields, both 25, welcomed sons Artemis, Curtis and Denahi and daughter Eudora in a multiple birth first reported by Austin American-statesman.

The children join three siblings in Martinez-Fields’ family of nine.

“It didn’t sink in at all,” Martinez, of Jarrell, Texas, tells PEOPLE about the birth of her quads. “I don’t feel like it’s ever going to happen, because I still don’t believe it.”

“For me, I don’t think I did anything crazy,” she adds. “This is our life.”

Martinez says she and Fields found out she was pregnant on Jan. 20. He had just recently started serving as a correctional officer, so he waited for his insurance to kick in before making an appointment to see his OB/GYN.

However, she later experienced pain at work and went to the ER on her own where she had an ultrasound.

“One of the nurses who came in joked, ‘What would you do if you had more?’ ” Martinez recalls. “I was like, Oh, that would be crazy. She said, “What would you do if you had more than two?” I was like, “You might have to recognize me. I think I might lose it.”

“He laughed and walked out of the room,” Martinez continued. “Then he came back with the doctor, and the doctor said, ‘In my 20s, I’ve never had to tell anyone this. You’ve got quads.’ I just started crying. I couldn’t believe it.”

Martinez called her husband from the hospital and told him they were expecting more than one baby.

“He said, ‘Are we having twins? I said, ‘No. More than that.’ He said, “Three? No, stop playing. I said, “No, I’m not playing. It’s more than that. He said, ‘Four?’ He couldn’t believe it.”

Dr. Jasbir Singh, Maternal-Fetal Medicine Specialist at St. David’s North Austin Medical Center in Austin, Texas, oversaw Martinez’s care following the ultrasound, describing the natural conception of quadruplets as unusual.

He called the probability of having natural quadruplets between 1 in 700,000 and one in a million.

“These days we see twins and triplets quite often, following infertility treatments,” he tells PEOPLE. “But hers was a spontaneous quadruple pregnancy, which is extraordinarily unique and rare and made it very special. And even more so was that there were three identical babies, which is just remarkable.”

He says that in Martinez’s situation, she was carrying four babies but only had two placentas. “The placenta is basically the heart-lung machine, or the roots of the tree, that provide nutrients to the tree,” he says. “So three babies were sharing a root system.”

Singh recommended that Martinez start co-sleeping around the 26th week of pregnancy, with the babies due at 30 weeks. “Quadruplets are very complicated,” he says. “Multiple gestations are very complicated because they have an extraordinarily high rate of preterm birth. The average gestational age for twins is about 36 weeks. And for triplets, it’s about 32 weeks. You can imagine it’s even earlier for quadruplets, but there are a number of complications that can occur during pregnancy.”

Martinez continued to work at her job until she experienced contractions and was admitted to St. David’s North Austin on June 14th. During her stay, she was visited by her three children and her husband Shawnpail, who brought a PlayStation to the hospital to entertain her.

“It took us a while to figure out how to connect him to the hospital,” Martinez recalls. “Once we figured it out, me and my dad were playing Call of duty every night. It was quite nice to have a sense of normalcy when you are there. So crochet [baby blankets] and Call of duty they were the biggest consumers of my time.

On July 13, a problem involving the delivery of nutrients through the cord of Artemis, one of the quads, caused the delivery. “He didn’t get as much as he should have the way the others are,” Martinez says. “We were all on Artemis’ timeline.”

“[Artemis] he became very small and very sick,” Singh says, “and we wanted to maximize the pregnancy for everyone’s benefit, because you can’t go in and deliver one baby and leave the others behind. We really had to push the envelope for that little baby so that the other babies could benefit and maximize their potential. So we gritted our teeth for a while, but eventually that baby declared itself sick enough that we had to deliver.”

The birth took place in an operating theater large enough to accommodate as many medical personnel as needed. “They say that usually when you get on the team for yourself, people will give you a c-section and then a team for the baby,” Martinez recalls. “So they had to have four separate teams, one for each kid. It was pretty packed in there.”

Then the quads came out: Artemis at 2 lbs., 1 oz.; Denhai at 3 lbs., 1 oz.; Curtis at 3 lbs., 2 oz. and Eudora at 2 lbs. and 13 oz. Because they were born prematurely, they were each transported to the NICU where they were later seen by their mother after she recovered in the postpartum room.

After Martinez was released from the hospital three days after giving birth, she and Fields took turns visiting the quads based on the couple’s work schedule and who would be available to care for their older children.

At the end of August, Curtis, Denahi and Eudora were able to go home, while Artemis’ hospital stay was extended due to feeding issues. He was finally discharged on November 9. Now with all the quads at home, Martinez says he can now breathe again. “It felt like I’d been waiting and waiting and waiting. We feel whole now. We can get back to our new normal life.”

When they found out they were going to have quads early in their pregnancy, Martinez and Fields bought a van to accommodate their large brood. The family recently moved into a new house after previously living in an apartment.

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“We’re just doing our best to try to figure it out and see what works best for us,” Martinez says of the couple’s new adaptation. “And my husband’s back at work now, so when he’s at work, I’m at home with the babies and [elder] the girls go to school. And then when he’s home in the afternoon, it’s like, okay, now I have a little break, you know? So we’re going to trade a little to make it work. We’ll figure it out.”

After the quads were born, Martinez had her tubes tied, as this was her last pregnancy. The family plans to spend the holiday at Martinez’s sister’s house. “It has the biggest living room, so we’re going to fill it up,” Martinez says. “It’s going to be great. Artemis missed Halloween, but that’s not crazy. She’ll be here for Christmas. I can’t wait.”

Looking back on the experience of giving birth to quadruplets, Martinez says, “When you’re just doing it, you don’t really have time to think about it because you’re pretty busy. But I think from an outsider’s perspective, it’s pretty crazy.”

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