Article on our TRIPLET GIRLS on the way!!

July 6, 2010
BY ELISABETH MARTIN

The soon-to-be nursery in Cassidy and Clif Novak's Palos Park home is mostly what you'd expect, with its lavender-painted walls and baby clothes tucked into the closet. But then you see the cribs.

"I got up this morning and I was like, 'Cribs. Oh, my gosh. There's three of them. We're going to have three kids,' " Clif said. "It's like an army barracks."

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• MULTIPLE MIRACLES

Later this summer, those three cribs will be filled with a gurgling set of triplet girls, whom first-time parents Clif, 30, and Cassidy, 26, conceived naturally. While that's a rare enough feat by itself, the arrival of these particular triplets might be best described as a miracle.

Six years ago, doctors warned Cassidy's family that she likely would never walk again after she suffered a severe brain injury in a boating accident. Instead, the Florida native made a full recovery, met the love of her life by chance at a wedding, married him and moved halfway across the country to start their new life together.

"It's been an emotional whirlwind," Cassidy said. "But like everybody says, we do everything out of the norm."

Minutes from death

Both devout Christians, Cassidy and Clif say it was God who saved Cassidy after her accident and later led the couple to each other.

"That was one of the main attracting factors when we first met, just being on that same spiritual level," Clif said.

It was Memorial Day weekend in 2004 when Cassidy fell into the water while tubing at a friend's lake house in central Florida. She bounced three times in the water, she said, and the third time her head connected with something hard.

"I literally felt my brain move," she said.

Unconscious and vomiting, Cassidy was pulled from the water by her friends while others called 911. She was airlifted to the hospital in Orlando, where a surgeon discovered a half-inch blood clot covering half of her brain. The surgeon called Cassidy's parents, who asked him to wait to operate until they could get to the hospital. Not possible, the surgeon told them. She was minutes from death.

Cassidy said she remembers bits and pieces from the day, like seeing her body convulse on the table as she was wheeled into the operating room. But there's one moment in particular that stuck with her.

"While I was lying on the operating table, the last thing I remember is seeing a butterfly on the ceiling," she said. "So butterflies are our thing. It's actually going to be the theme for the nursery. It means rebirth and new life."

After the operation, the doctor gently told Cassidy's parents about the sobering realities of brain injury, which often leave victims unable to walk, talk or read. But Cassidy stunned hospital staff by waking up a short time later and recognizing her family. Days later, she was walking again and was transferred to a rehabilitation unit.

"It was a real reality check because everyone else had the same 12-inch incision that I did, and they were all in wheelchairs. I just walked in," Cassidy said.

Cassidy spent just three days in rehab before she was sent home by her doctor, who called her "medically unexplainable." Still, she struggled to relearn simple tasks like using a fork and writing.

To this day, she suffers from migraines and nosebleeds, and five metal plates now hold her skull together. But Cassidy, who started doing motivational speaking after the accident, said the experience changed her the most emotionally.

"No one was drinking, no one was doing anything reckless (the day of the accident)," she said. "It just shows that you really have no idea when you get in your car and go away what might happen, so just always leave things on good terms with the people you love."

Surprise!

Cassidy's hair still was growing back slowly over her surgery scar when she met Clif 10 months after her accident. In a scenario worthy of a Hollywood rom-com, the two were each standing up for a friend in a wedding in Florida and were paired together by chance.

"He went to walk me down the aisle and said, 'This is the first time, but not the last,' " Cassidy said. "I was like, 'Who is this guy?' "

Exactly one year later, the two married on a Florida beach at sunset, then settled in Illinois. Clif, a Lansing native and Thornton Fractional South High School graduate, had courted Cassidy long distance before their marriage, so the two pledged to wait a couple of years before trying to start a family. The couple said they weren't trying to conceive when they discovered earlier this year that Cassidy was pregnant - and then the surprises kept coming.

"We went for our first ultrasound, and they're like, 'Surprise! You wanted more than one kid, right?' They said it was twins," Cassidy said.

As that news sank in, Cassidy went for her first multiples specialist visit, where a nurse pointed out what her regular doctor had missed: One of the sacs in her uterus contained two fetuses, not one.

"I said to the doctor, 'You better check in there pretty good, because if we come back again and find something else, I'm going to have a heart attack,' " Clif said.

With the extra babies have come extra complications in Cassidy's pregnancy. First, she developed hyperemesis, a rare complication that made her constantly sick to her stomach for the first four months; more recently, her resting heart rate has shot up to the low 120s. As of June, she was as big as a woman carrying a single child about to give birth, and she's due to get much, much bigger.

The babies "should be right between 5 1 / 2 and 7 pounds apiece when she delivers," said Dr. William Meyer, the director of maternal fetal medicine at Hinsdale Hospital, where Cassidy is a patient. "She loses a tremendous amount of weight right away."

Message received

Despite Cassidy's various maladies, Meyer says her triplets look great and that her accident hasn't raised any red flags during her pregnancy, either. She'll deliver the babies by Caesarean section at the end of August or early September, and if everything goes according to plan, they'll all head home three days later.

"She was cleared by her neurologist to have a pregnancy," Meyer said. "She's doing quite well."

On the home front, Cassidy and Clif have been trolling garage sales for baby clothes and furniture and frantically prepping their three-bedroom ranch home before Cassidy gets too big to move around much.

"I hear strains from the other room, and I'm like, 'Are you OK?' She's like, 'I'm just getting up!' " Clif said.

When the girls do arrive, the couple has their names ready: Cadence Lily, Cailynn Juliet and Chloe Glo. Other things, like telling the girls apart when they're newborns, still are up in the air.

"We've heard painting their nails, and we've also heard about getting their ears pierced at six months," Cassidy said. "His sister's looking at getting ID bracelets."

"We don't want it to be like that episode of 'Full House' where Jesse can't tell his kids apart," Clif said jokingly.

The couple admit they're nervous about the prospect of three kids at once, and Cassidy says pregnancy's been harder than she expected. But unlike the last time she struggled with health issues, this time she has a partner.

"With brain surgery, my family was so supportive, but it's completely different when you're married," Cassidy said. "It's been a lot better."

Every night, the couple says, they sing to their unborn girls and then pray over them. Sitting on their couch at home, Cassidy goes through the laundry list of concerns that they've laid at God's feet.

"We're praying for their well-being and mine during the pregnancy, that we have wisdom as parents and that we have great lives together," Cassidy said.

And with that, an answering machine clicks on in their kitchen and chirps, "Message received." Clif and Cassidy burst out laughing.

"That is so funny," Cassidy said through giggles. "He got it. He got it."

THE DETAILS ON TRIPLETS

It's pretty uncommon to conceive triplets, which account for just one of every 652 pregnancies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But conceiving triplets naturally is even rarer. Though firm statistics are scarce, the odds are estimated to be about 1 in 8,000.

"For triplets, (the mothers) are virtually all in fertility or (in vitro fertilization)," said Dr. William Meyer, the director of maternal fetal medicine at Hinsdale Hospital.

While some have surmised that parents of multiples are more likely to have multiples again, Meyer says there's no hard and fast proof that that's true. Still, he says genetics do predispose some people to having a brood all at once.

"If they're in fertility treatment, it's all dependent on that," he said. "For spontaneous multiples, you always hear these stories about people who have twins and then triplets, so it kind of makes sense."

Women carrying triplets often experience more complications, including hyperemesis, which causes chronic and severe vomiting, as well as hypertension, gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. Triplets generally are delivered electively by Caesarean section at 36 weeks, when Meyer said they'll typically be just as healthy as if they were carried to term.