Countywide : ‘Miracle’ Quadruplets Celebrate at a Birthday Bash

It was a perfect picture for the baby book--or books. Consider:

* Four highchairs placed in a row.

* Four miniature birthday cakes in the center of the highchair trays.

* And four delighted babies--two boys in blue coveralls, two girls in frilly pink dresses--reaching pudgy fingers toward their cakes, tasting a little and then-- smoosh! --smearing their small, round faces with frosting.

The Miner quadruplets celebrated their first birthday in style Thursday at UCI Medical Center in Orange, where they were born last Feb. 10, at a party put on by the center. And on hand to celebrate with them were parents Al and Karen Miner, a handful of relatives and 40 of the doctors, nurses and hospital staffers who helped Brianna, Whitney, Vincent and Jeffrey Miner into the world.

They cooed at the babies, sang “Happy Birthday” to them and generally expressed amazement that these quadruplets, born two months premature and weighing about 4 pounds each, could have grown into normal, healthy children.

“They’re wonderful,” sighed neonatologist Louis Gluck as he watched little Brianna push both fists into her cake.

Seven years ago, UCI doctors delivered a set of quintuplets, and last September, another set of quadruplets. Still, “any time there’s a multiple birth like this, it’s always marvelous,” Gluck said.

“It’s really a miracle,” agreed obstetrician Manuel Porto, who led a “Quadruplets Interdisciplinary Task Force” of 100 doctors and nurses--with teams assigned to Karen Miner and to each baby--that delivered the babies by Cesarean section.

“We were prepared for the worst,” Porto recalled. “Luckily, 90% of what we planned, we didn’t need.”

The birth of quadruplets is a rare and risky event. Without fertility techniques, the incidence of quadruplets is once every 500,000 pregnancies.

But Karen Miner’s babies were conceived with a fertility technique known as GIFT, in which four of her eggs were retrieved, combined with her husband’s sperm and then placed in her Fallopian tube so fertilization could occur naturally.

Usually with GIFT, most of the eggs do not become embryos, so the Miners were amazed to learn Karen had four. Although she had the option to terminate one or more of them, she chose to keep all of them. “For four years we wanted a baby,” the 33-year-old former schoolteacher said Thursday. “And we got the babies that we wanted.”

The babies Thursday were the picture of health. They weighed from 17 to 20 pounds. Three have light blond hair but Vincent’s is light brown. And they have distinct personalities, their parents said. Brianna loves people, Vincent is a “quiet explorer,” Whitney usually discovers things first and Jeffrey is “our ticklish, laughable kid,” their dad explained.

The quads love playing with each other, the 35-year-old systems analyst said, and lately they like “to hold meetings. They go into the bathroom and bang on the top of the toilet and then they all flush the toilet.”

As the party ended, Karen Miner cuddled Brianna and watched UCI staffers play with her other babies. This first birthday celebration “is more than just a birthday party,” she said. “It’s a celebration of life to me. All the babies are healthy. A year ago, we didn’t know.”