An ‘exceptionally challenging adventure’: Mother gives birth to quadruplets after brain tumor removed

Katie Sturm was just three months pregnant when she suffered a seizure at work.

At UT Southwestern, she found out she had a glioma, a type of tumor in the brain and spinal cord that can be life-threatening.

Doctors would have preferred to remove the tumor quickly, but they were worried about the effects a major surgery might have on Sturm and her unborn babies — all four of them.

“When I found out I was having quadruplets, I straight up cried for like two days,” Sturm, who is now 27, said Tuesday at a news conference with her family and the medical team.

The babies were not conceived through in vitro fertilization, which increases the chances of multiple births. Doctors say quadruplets like hers, which are not identical, occur only once in every 700,000 births.

She’d just gotten over the shock of the news about her pregnancy when she had the seizure.

“When I found out I had the brain tumor, it was just kind of so surreal. It was hard to believe,” she said.

The tumor looked as though it was growing slowly, so doctors planned to wait to operate until after her children were born.

“But Katie’s tumor had other ideas,” said Dr. Toral Patel, Katie’s doctor and an assistant professor of neurological surgery at UT Southwestern. Two weeks later, she suffered another seizure in her home.

“We had to basically throw the initial plan out the window,” said her husband, 33-year-old Chris Sturm. “When I saw the second one myself, it became a real thing. It was one of those moments where the possibility that something could happen to my wife and my kids is very prevalent and very real.”

He said they were in the hospital for Katie’s surgery on March 22, the day Dallas County announced its shelter-in-place order.

Also, the couple were in the process of finding a new house to accommodate their children — the four boys on the way as well as their 3-year-old son, Ryan. The family now lives in Haslet, north of Fort Worth.

“This whole year has just been a lot of changes,” Chris Sturm said. “I don’t know how to really describe it other than the giant ball of anxiety.”

Katie Sturm and her children didn’t have complications from the surgery, which took place during her second trimester. She recovered at home during lockdown orders.

At 32 weeks, doctors decided it was time to deliver the babies. On July 3, she gave birth via C-section to Austin, Daniel, Jacob and Hudson.

They were the first set of quadruplets ever born at UT Southwestern’s William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital.

The hospital prepared for the births for nearly two months because such deliveries require an array of medical personnel.

In March, identical quadruplets were born at 28 weeks to a Dallas couple at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, with the help of 24 doctors and nurses.

For the Sturms, a 21-member team assisted with the delivery, said Dr. Becky Ennis, associate professor in pediatrics and the medical director of the hospital’s neonatal intensive-care unit.

“We assigned every baby a color, and we assigned their rooms early on,” she said. “All the medications, all the equipment were being stored in their color-coded rooms. And on the day of delivery, we were color coded as well.

“The head of each team had a surgical cap on that was color coded and had the baby’s letter on it — baby A, B, C and D — so if you looked around the room, you could tell which physician or nurse practitioner was in charge of which baby.”

The boys remained in neonatal intensive care while they gained weight, learned how to feed from a bottle and improved their breathing. Austin and Jacob stayed for a month, Daniel went home about a week and a half later and Hudson was cared for almost two months before going home, Ennis said.

“They weighed between three and four pounds each at birth, which is just amazing and more than we could have ever hoped for when we were first talking about the boys coming several weeks before they were due,” she said.

It’s possible Katie Sturm’s tumor could recur, but Patel said she’s optimistic and commended her for the way she handled so many challenges during her pregnancy.

“The intersection of natural quadruplets and a glioma in a single human, all during the course of pregnancy, I’m quite certain has never happened on this planet before and may never happen again,” she said. “To say that Katie is a unique, strong woman is an understatement.”

The couple say they feel extremely lucky despite all the difficulties.

“There’s not an instruction manual for quadruplets. There’s no book that says, ‘This is how you do this.’ It’s just kind of, ‘Here are babies,’” Chris Sturm said. “It’s been a fun and exceptionally challenging adventure to say the least.”