A US woman found out that she was pregnant with quadruplets after she visited the doctor for a sore throat. The 20-year-old Illinois nursing assistant, Katelyn Yates, said how an ordinary trip to the emergency room turned into a life-altering revelation. 

Doctors had informed her that she would require an X-ray, before which she was required to take a pregnancy test due to the potential harm radiation could pose to a fetus. When Yates's results came back, her human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) levels — the hormone indicating pregnancy was said to be “off the charts.”

“I was completely in shock,” Yates recalled, she initially thought her doctor was pulling a prank. Her now-fiance, 21-year-old Julian Bueker, whom she’d been dating for just six months at the time, was “so excited” and helped her be calm.

Yates followed through with a difficult pregnancy, she was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a serious condition that causes dangerously high blood pressure, and her health rapidly deteriorated during her third trimester.

She said she “couldn’t breathe on her own” and added how her liver and kidneys also began to fail.

After 28 weeks, Yates gave birth via C-section on October 17 to quadruplets: Elizabeth Taylor, Zya Grace, and identical twins Max Ashton and Elliot Ryker. The smallest baby was Elizabeth, who weighed 1 pound 2 ounces; while Max, the largest of the bunch, weighed 2 pounds, 6 ounces.

However, all four babies are doing remarkably well, gaining weight and growing. "They're doing phenomenal. They are gaining weight and growing. Elizabeth is about six grams away from reaching two pounds," she said.

According to the Journal of Family and Reproductive Health, the odds of naturally conceiving quadruplets are staggeringly low – less than one in 500,000. Spontaneous quadruplet pregnancies like hers are exceptionally rare across the US. However, the incidence of higher-order multiple births has declined significantly over the past few decades. 

As per the report by The Independent, this decline is primarily attributed to advancements and modifications in assisted reproductive technologies (ART), including the adoption of guidelines aimed at limiting the number of embryos transferred during in vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedures.