She has lupus, purpura and thrombophilia, and was the mother of quadruplets in the midst of the pandemic: "God sent my family in a single miracle"
Adriana Beramendi was born in Buenos Aires, but when she was a child she moved to Salta with her family. She is 24 years old and, after being diagnosed with lupus, purpura and thrombophilia, she thought she could never be a mother, even though it was what she had dreamed of since she was little. She lost two pregnancies and, on the third attempt, the doctors told her that it would be difficult for her quadruplets to all be born alive . But she was convinced, "they are going to be born, and the four of them are going to be born," she repeated to herself, and that's how it was.
On May 7, at the Ramón Sardá Maternal and Child Hospital in the City of Buenos Aires, she gave birth to her babies: Zoe Fiorela, Jeziel Mauricio, Adriel Shamil and Gabriel Ulises. She spent three months alone with the hospital staff because, in the midst of mandatory, preventive and social isolation (ASPO), her husband, Ulises, 22, she couldn't travel and her mother, Martha, who had arrived in Buenos Aires with her, couldn't go near it either because she could pose a risk in the face of the coronavirus pandemic .
Despite these adversities, Adriana was very grateful to the doctors, nurses and staff of Sardá, for the accompaniment and support she received. "I was always well cared for, well monitored, from the moment I entered ", she remarked in dialogue with TN.com.ar . In turn, she especially remembered the psychologist, who helped her understand her pregnancy and the disease she has.
“God sent my family in a single miracle”, admitted this mother, who at this very strong moment took refuge in faith, began to pray more and ask for the health of her family.
The first to be born was Zoe, who weighed 3,000 pounds. "She was a very small thing and I can't believe she came out of me," she admitted. Then, Jeziel arrived, with 990 grams, "he was the smallest of all"; followed by Adriel, with 1,080 kilos; and the last one, which was the largest, was Ulises Gabriel, who weighed 1,460 kilos.
Adriana chose each of her children's names for their profound meanings: “Zoe means full of life and Fiorella, little flower; Adriel is God's shepherd and Yamil means understanding; Ulysses is God and Gabriel, with a strong character; Finally, Jeziel means God unites and Mauricio is a good person”.
The four babies remained hospitalized for three months, until August 3, when they were discharged. Since Adriana, her mother and her children could not yet return to Salta, the Government of the City of Buenos Aires lent them an apartment to temporarily stay.
With the easing of the quarantine, on August 16, Ulises was able to arrive,, the new father of the quadruplets. However, it was only 14 days later that he was able to meet them, because before he had to comply with the mandatory quarantine in case he was infected. “It was very moving, we all cried”, Adriana recalled about that moment when she hugged her husband again and introduced him to their children, after almost five months of being away from him and having given birth alone, 1,500 kilometers from her home.
Now the family is anxiously awaiting the first days of November, when the quadruplets will have another general check-up after which they will be told if they are able to travel to Salta . “At the moment everything is going well. It depends on what they tell me, we are wanting to be able to leave, "said Adriana. Although he clarified: "They have to enable travel at the national level, otherwise we cannot."
// “Why did you take so long to come find us": he had two teenage children, fell in love with his best friend and together they adopted three little sisters
As he explained, since their babies are premature they require more check-ups and they decided to wait a little longer in the City of Buenos Aires because when they return to Salvador Mazza, they will have to carry out general check-ups every three months in Salta city, which implies an eight-hour trip. "For each baby, one person has to travel," said the mother of the quadruplets.
The couple can't wait to get back together. Today, they need at least one more member of the Beramendi team. “The babies are five and a half months old, and the three of us can no longer handle the four of us. We lack a hand to be able to take care of them”, highlighted Adriana, and explained that they must organize themselves to comply with each routine.
“To bathe them, my husband changes them, my mother bathes them and I give them the vitamins, I dry them and change them. They immediately want to drink the milk, but they must wait half an hour for the medicine. So we have to keep them up because they cry”, exemplified the mother.
She also said that there is always one of the babies who is left without arms, because before they lifted two by two but now they can't, because they weigh more. For this reason, they are anxious to reach Salvador Mazza, where their two sisters are waiting to help them.
Ulysses' relatives will have to wait a little longer to meet the quadruplets, since they live on the Bolivian side and international borders remain closed. “We hope we can be there to spend the holidays together,” exclaimed Adriana.
During his stay at Sardá, the photographer Hernán Churba made an audiovisual production in which he decided to tell the story of this mother and her odyssey to bring her children into the world in the midst of the pandemic . About this video, the author said: “The objective of it is to make his work visible (in reference to the hospital staff), as well as to know some examples of the stories that happen and they can be found in these places.”
From the sanatorium, and with the help of the people who came to accompany her, Adriana launched a solidarity campaign to ask for help from society to stay with her family in Buenos Aires until that they can return to Salta.
Right now, she needs summer clothes, a fan, diapers, and milk. Also cash to help her buy tickets to her province, since they must travel by plane and do not receive assistance from the State to be able to afford them.
An 'express trip' that changed all plans
Adriana planned to have her babies in a hospital in the capital of Salta, where Salvador Mazza's doctors explained that they would receive better care , since they have more infrastructure. But, when they arrived, they realized that she had an expired ID card and the health personnel told them that, for this reason, "they were going to have limited access to medicines."
“I needed to renew it and they asked me for the birth certificate, which took from one to three months,” explained Adriana. Since she was born in Moreno, in the province of Buenos Aires, she decided to get the tickets and travel to process it personally.
It was two days on board a bus with her mother: something that would be exhausting for anyone, for her with a risky pregnancy, became an enormous challenge. They arrived on a Friday and they thought that on Monday, they could look for the birth certificate and return to her province.
It was March 16 and neither of them imagined that the following Friday the president Alberto Fernández would decree preventive and compulsory social isolation (ASPO), leaving them required in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.
Adriana and Martha slept the first two days in a lodging. “I felt fatigued, we were Saturday and Sunday in a paid place. My mom had to buy me two vials of heparin for thrombophilia and we didn't think it was that expensive. We ran out of money,” he recalled.
Martha went to a Retirement Church to ask for help and the priest called a hostel for people who have nowhere to sleep. The next day, they took her to see the Sardá maternity hospital. “They admitted me to do a general control. It was going to be a week or something, but they prohibited me from traveling with my belly”, he recalled.
Two of the quadruplets were ill and Adriana was not feeling well. “My body couldn't take it anymore. On May 7th I had a caesarean section at 4:30 p.m. I was very afraid that something would happen to me or my babies. The moment I heard them crying and the doctors showed them to me, I felt very happy, very moved, I thanked God because they were fine”, she assured.
Against all medical odds, this young mom had just delivered her babies and they were all alive. However, she was alone in the hospital , she did not have anyone from her family with her due to the protocols imposed by the pandemic. “I spent three months without being able to see my mom because the virus was complicated and I didn't want to expose her or the babies,” she remarked.
Thus, the doctors, nurses and staff of Sardá became her support and that of her children. To this day, Adriana believes that God guided her to that place, that her children were to be born there, and she is infinitely grateful for the quality of care and support they provided her.
Thrombophilia, purpura, and lupus: a grim prognosis
At the age of 15, Adriana Beramendi began to have health problems. Her body looked bruised, her head ached when she was in the sun and her nose bleeds. The doctors thought she might have leukemia.
She was admitted to a hospital in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, very close to her town, where she was diagnosed with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), a disease that attacks platelets. At that time, doctors recommended that she not have children.
Shortly after, she met Ulises. After a year and a half of relationship, without planning it, she got pregnant , but she ended up losing the baby. Then the same thing happened again. It was after the loss of the second pregnancy that a new diagnosis arrived: lupus . The doctors once again recommended that she not have children. “I have lupus, purpura, and thrombophilia,” Adriana explained.
Without planning, the couple became pregnant again. “The doctor looked at the ultrasound and got scared, he told me it wasn't a baby. Imagine if I was like this with one baby how am I going to be with two, I told him. And the doctor told me there are four babies. I was very scared," he said.
When she told her husband, he was silent, “in shock”, but then he reacted and tried to reassure her. They were far away, since he had not been able to accompany her, so they shared the moment by phone.
Both she and her husband had a history of twin pregnancy. On behalf of Adriana's father's family there was a case of twins, and on Ulises's side, of twins.
The family had decided to have their babies in Bolivia, where Ulises is from, but terrible news made them change their decision. "The doctor told me I had to choose three babies and make one die. I told him no, if they had to be born, all four had to be born."
Fortunately, a succession of unfortunate events led her to travel 1,500 kilometers and left her in the hands of the specialists at the Sardá maternity hospital and, despite the fact that her condition was really complicated, she achieved what she wanted .
“The probability of having quadruplets spontaneously, with four different ovules, is one in 600,000, the probability of having purple is 20 out of 100,000, and lupus is 10 out of 100,000, that is, It is a tremendously rare combination of factors”, highlighted Dr. Fernando Neuspiller, a fertility specialist, gynecologist and director of IVI Buenos Aires.
And he gave details about the risks that these pathologies, which he defined as "an explosive combination", could have brought to the mother and her babies. “Lupus and purpura are autoimmune diseases, which means that your body rejects or recognizes a part of the platelets as a foreign process, so it attacks them and, when it does, it causes them to disappear ”, he began explaining.
And he added: “In pregnancy, there is also a kind of 'relative platelet count', which is a decrease in them. Therefore, it is a somewhat complex combination of pregnancy plus idiopathic thrombotic purpura, even more so having quadruplets, because sometimes the antibodies that attack platelets also get inside the placenta and could affect the platelet system of the mothers. babies”.
In addition, the specialist highlighted that lupus, in general, "does not affect babies per se, but can affect -not in all cases- the mother, attacking certain organs, such as the kidneys, and bringing associated diseases such as hypertension, renal, cardiac, and pulmonary hypertension.
For this reason, Neuspiller considered that Adriana "was very lucky" and warned "that she must have been very well treated at the Sardá, which is a large state maternity hospital, to be able to carry this pregnancy forward ”.
Related Articles