MANSFIELD — Brooke Larson said she had about two minutes to meet her newborn son Crew before he needed to have surgery.
“I remember just rubbing his head and telling him how much I loved him, and how strong he was and that he could beat all this,” she said. “It wasn’t a big surgery, but he’s just a 30-week-old baby.”
Crew was born prematurely in Mansfield with his siblings, Dixie and Barrett, on Dec. 15.
Larson said she and her husband, Chris Larson, had been trying to start a family for about four years.
“We tried on our own for two years and nothing happened, so I decided I was tired of waiting and called the RGI Fertility Clinic in Westerville to get help,” she said.
After routine treatments of Clomid and Ovidrel, Larson said she and her husband agreed to try in vitro fertilization if she couldn’t get pregnant.
“On the fifth and final try, I got a positive pregnancy test at the end of May,” she said. “The doctor said I should wait two weeks before testing, but — me being me — I went out and bought a bunch of tests.”
Though the first pregnancy tests Larson took were negative, she said she took another test with “the faintest positive line.”
“After work, I took another one and it was way darker,” she said. “I was in total and utter shock. I didn’t believe that I finally got a positive pregnancy test after four years.”
Larson said she was telling her husband what to expect when they went in for her first ultrasound in July when she was met with another surprise.
“The screen was in front of me, so I couldn’t see anything and I heard my husband say, ‘Oh, really?’ and he was grasping the wall, so I grabbed the screen and flipped it around to look at it.”
When Larson found out she was pregnant with triplets, she said she couldn’t believe it.
“I probably said four or five times to the doctor, ‘Shut up, you’re lying to me,’” she said. “And then I just laughed because I didn’t know what else to do.
“That’s kind of what we did throughout our whole pregnancy.”
Larson works as a flex nurse for OhioHealth and said her medical background helped her monitor symptoms that merited going to the doctor.
“December 14, I just felt kind of off so I told my husband let’s go to labor and delivery in Mansfield just to get checked out,” she said. “My doctor said we need to get you to Riverside Maternity right away, so they life-flighted me to Columbus.
“When I got there, I was having contractions.”
Larson said her postpartum hospital stay was four days long. Crew was being treated at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, and his siblings were later transferred so the Larsons wouldn’t have to travel between hospitals to see all the triplets.
Larson said all her babies are still in the NICU and on a regular care schedule. Being a new parent with three babies in the NICU has its challenges, but Larson said she knows her children are in good hands.
“If I’m there at their care times, I’m able to do the diaper changes, mouth swabs and feed them myself,” she said. “When my husband’s not working, we work out who’s holding whom so we can each have a turn holding each baby.”
Though she’s only been a mother for a few weeks, Larson said this experience has helped her become a better nurse.
“Being on the other side of things, especially being hospitalized, made me appreciate more of my job and my patients,” she said. “We put all our patients through this stuff without really knowing what it’s like in their shoes.”
Larson said she’s happy she was able to build a family with fertility treatments but knows not everyone can.
“I know people who have been totally devastated because their treatments didn’t work, and it’s OK to be mad and angry that it failed,” she said. “If you want a baby, there are endless means to be able to have a family, whether that’s through treatment, adoption, fostering and things like that.”
Larson thanked all the doctors and nurses who have helped her and her children through their hospital stays. She said Nationwide nurses gave her “the best Christmas gift ever” by organizing a way for her to hold all the triplets Dec. 25.
“I couldn’t have asked for anything better,” Larson said. “My babies will probably still be in the hospital for another few weeks. I hope they can come home soon, but I don’t want to rush it because I want them to be totally healthy.”
