Not even a second battle with cancer could stop this woman from giving birth not just to one, not two, not three, but to four babies in one day.
Kalya Gayton, 29, gave birth to quadruplets on Friday last week at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, WKRN reported.
Gayton, already a mother of two, has fought and won his first battle with cancer and is fighting a second one. She reportedly found out she was pregnant after finishing five rounds of chemotherapy.
Doctors said Gayton has a 50 percent chance of survival over the next five years. But the strong-willed mother is unfazed by it all, telling a TV news reporter, "We know that He's [God's] gotta have a different plan up there for us, and surely everything's gonna work out in the end."
Gayton described giving birth to quadruplets as "nerve-wracking," adding that "to see them when they all came out and to hear them crying, that was really exciting."
She said she was thrilled after finding out that she was carrying four babies inside her even though she did not use fertility drugs. At the same time though she was not sure if she could handle the experience, given the fact that she's in the midst of her second battle with cancer.
"My original goal to make was 34 weeks because I figured if I could beat cancer, surely I could make it to 34 weeks with quads," she said. "I just kept trying to tell myself that I could do it."
Last year, Gayton was first diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a disease that the American Cancer Society says is a cancer that starts in a person's white blood cells.
She underwent treatment and was eventually declared cancer-free.
However, Gayton later showed again the symptoms of Hodgkin's Lymphoma —fevers, weight loss and night sweats — while she was pregnant. A biopsy confirmed that her cancer had returned.
"You think you've beat it the first time. When it comes back, you're just wondering why get pregnant with these four babies and then, you know, something like this happens," she said.
Her husband was disconsolate. "She'd worked really hard to [fight] it the first time, and to come back and have to go through it all again, it breaks my heart," her husband Charles said.
