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Mom of Quadruplets Had Heart Failure Before Preemies Were Born. 'It Hit Me So Quick,' She Says

Mom of Quadruplets Had Heart Failure Before Preemies Were Born. 'It Hit Me So Quick,' She Says

Yahoo09-05-2025

During Jenny LeBrun's fourth pregnancy, she learned she was carrying quadruplets
At 28 weeks, LeBrun went into heart failure, and her babies were born 11 weeks early
"We're very busy, but very blessed," the now mom-of-seven tells PEOPLE
When Jenny LeBrun learned she was carrying quadruplets, the then-mom-of-three was surprised, but grateful that her pregnancy had progressed uneventfully. Then, when she reached 28 weeks, she went into heart failure.
'My heart was pumping for five people,' the former South Dakota middle school language arts teacher, 39, tells PEOPLE. 'It just couldn't keep up anymore.'
Thankfully, she was at the hospital for an appointment when she started coughing and couldn't catch her breath. 'The doctor said my lungs sounded like tissue paper moving around,' LeBrun remembers. 'My lungs were filling up with fluid.'
LeBrun went on immediate bedrest. Five days later, her sons, Cru, Levi and Grayson, and her daughter, Oakley, were born at 29 weeks in October 2022.
'It was really scary,' LeBrun says of the incident, which shocked her and her husband, Dusty. 'For me to have such a great pregnancy for 28 weeks and then, boom, it hit me so quick,' she says.
Now 2-and-a-half years old, the quadruplets are healthy and keep their family busy.
'We're thankful because we're not dealing with some of the health issues that we potentially could have been dealing with,' says Jenny of having preemie babies that were also multiples.
Jenny and Dusty's positive attitude helped them navigate the quadruplets and multiple health scares that occurred before and after the babies were born.
Married since 2013, the couple started trying for their fourth baby with the help of fertility drugs. Jenny didn't undergo any procedures and, upon learning she was pregnant, doctors saw no signs that she was carrying multiples. But when the mom had her first ultrasound, she learned there were four babies.
Dusty, who is a farmer in their hometown of Coleman, South Dakota, was working in the fields when Jenny went to the appointment. The two — who share son Jack, who is now 10, daughter Addy, 6, and son Hunter, 5 — were in disbelief at the news.
'He did not believe me. He thought I was pranking him,' says Jenny, who remembers telling her 40-year-old husband that they needed a bigger vehicle. 'It was kind of my first thought, which is just funny.'
Months later, her near-death experience scared them both. Jenny fully recovered and the babies, who were born 11 weeks early, had to stay in the NICU at Avera Health in Sioux Falls for two months.
The new parents thought the worst was over when they were discharged, but two weeks later, they returned to the hospital. Cru 'stopped breathing,' his mom says. The newborn was diagnosed with respiratory syncytial virus, more commonly known as RSV, and had to be airlifted to Avera.
Not long after, his sister Oakley also came down with RSV. Jenny spent weeks around Christmas at the pediatric intensive care unit with her two babies before they recovered. 'The PICU stay completely caught us off guard,' she adds. 'We truly almost lost Cru and Oakley.'
The LeBruns found support in family, friends — even an anonymous family that bought them Christmas presents.
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More than two years later, the toddlers are happy and healthy.
Jack loves them, but also likes his own space, says Jenny. Hunter likes to play with his four youngest siblings, and Addy 'loves to take care of them.'
The help is appreciated. Jenny spends hours a week taking her youngest children to various therapy appointments to improve their mobility, speech and ability to eat. She laughs when they climb on top of countertops, the Jenny says.
'They've done a lot of physical therapy to be able to climb,' she says. 'We're very busy, but very blessed.'
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Inside Hospitals' Digital Command Centers
Inside Hospitals' Digital Command Centers

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RFK Jr.‘s mass firing of the government's vaccine experts, explained
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covers health for Vox, guiding readers through the emerging opportunities and challenges in improving our health. He has reported on health policy for more than 10 years, writing for Governing magazine, Talking Points Memo, and STAT before joining Vox in 2017. For the past 60 years, a committee of independent experts has advised the federal government on vaccine policy, providing guidance on which shots people should get and when. Government public health officials have almost always followed the panel's recommendations, all but making it the final word on public health policy in the US for most of its existence. And over those decades, the United States has made tremendous health gains over that time through mass vaccination campaigns. But on Monday, Health Secretary Robert F. 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This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. New committee members will be announced at some point, but as of Tuesday morning, even top US senators did not know who the replacements would be. The panel is supposed to hold one of its periodic public meetings in late June to discuss the Covid-19 vaccine, as well as shots for RSV and HPV, among others. This is a watershed moment in US public health, one that seems sure to sow confusion among patients and health care providers. The deepening divide between Kennedy's Make American Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and mainstream medicine could make it harder for people who want vaccines to get them, while encouraging more doubt about the value and safety of shots among the general public. Here's what you need to know. Why is Kennedy doing this? The vaccine advisory committee was first convened by the surgeon general in 1964, but it is not enshrined in federal law. That means that Kennedy — as the top official at the US Department of Health and Human Services, which contains the CDC — can change its membership or dissolve the panel entirely if he so desires. Kennedy framed his decision to clear out the members as necessary to restore public trust in the government's vaccine recommendations. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kennedy asserted the committee 'has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.' As health secretary, he has made overhauling vaccine policy a centerpiece of his agenda, both through his rhetoric and policy. Over the past few months, while the worst measles outbreak in 30 years has spread through the US, Kennedy has equivocated in public comments on the value of the measles vaccine, which doctors say is far and away the best tool to combat the disease. He directed an anti-vaccine researcher to scour federal data for evidence of a vaccine-autism link. His department's recent MAHA report on childhood chronic disease named vaccines as one example of how the US overmedicalizes its children and exposes them to artificial agents that could do harm to their body. Then in late May, Kennedy oversaw a revision of the federal government's Covid-19 vaccine guidance, limiting the shots to elderly people and those who are immunocompromised. He ended the recommendation that pregnant women and kids get a Covid vaccine shot, even though studies have shown they help confer immunity to infants, who are at a higher risk from the virus and cannot be vaccinated until they are 6 months old. The move plainly circumvented ACIP's accepted role in setting vaccine policy, presaging this week's mass firing. Whatever his intentions, Kennedy's gutting of the federal vaccine committee seems likely to sow even more distrust — and certainly more confusion. People are reasonably left to wonder whether they can trust forthcoming CDC guidance on vaccines, and just what vaccines they'll be able to get. How will I know which vaccines to get? In the past, ACIP would typically meet a few times a year to discuss any additions or changes to the country's vaccine schedule. Their recommendations have usually been adopted without alterations by the CDC director, and then became the standard for state and local health departments across the country. Importantly, most health plans are required to cover any shots that the committee recommends. Now there is far more uncertainty. Will doctors follow the CDC guidance, even if it changes under a new advisory panel staffed by Kennedy loyalists, or will they stick with the earlier vaccine schedule? Will health insurance plans cover the cost of a vaccine that professional medical organizations support but the CDC does not? Once-unthinkable questions could soon be something doctors and patients must deal with every day. Some doctors already believed, before the firings at ACIP, that the CDC was no longer trustworthy under Kennedy's leadership; his unilateral change to the Covid vaccine guidance in May was enough to convince them. In a media call last week, experts from the Infectious Disease Society of America urged patients and providers in the short term to consult with professional medical societies — not the CDC — on vaccine recommendations. They considered those groups, as well as guidance from European health authorities, the best substitutes we currently have for information on vaccines if the CDC's recommendations can no longer be taken at face value. 'It's been a confusing several days, confusing last two weeks, and I'm not sure that confusion is going to be abated in the near future,' John Lynch, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Washington, said on the call. 'These are evidence-based guidelines developed by experts in the field using transparent methods and published publicly,' Lynch said. Kennedy, in explaining his change to the Covid vaccine guidelines, said he wanted to encourage shared decision-making between providers and their patients. The CDC guidance would be only one consideration in the decision whether to vaccinate, rather than a firm recommendation. The doctors from the IDSA said that such conversations are already to be considered best practice among physicians — and noted Kennedy's undermining of trust in the federal vaccine policy would now make them more important. 'I would just emphasize the need to have a good source of information when this situation occurs. If indeed shared decision making is going to occur, we always do our research,' Dr. Flor Muñoz-Rivas at Baylor College of Medicine said. 'But go to the proper sources.' What are the long-term risks? There is a lot we don't know right now: Who will be named to the new panel? Will they change existing vaccine recommendations? Will they approve new ones? But the experts warned that Kennedy's rhetoric alone risks undermining people's confidence in vaccinations. 'All health care decisions are shared decision-making; this is not a special concept that's only rolled out for conversations like vaccination,' Lynch said on the IDSA call. 'As an infectious disease doctor, when I talk to a patient about treatment or diagnostics, it is a conversation. It is shared decision-making.' Kennedy has quickly disrupted decades of public health consensus. Anyone who watched the sometimes contentious ACIP meetings during the pandemic saw the members grappling with genuinely vexing questions about who should be prioritized for vaccination in a public health emergency. The pandemic featured rare examples of Biden CDC director Rochelle Walensky overruling the panel in certain cases in which the experts actually recommended against more vaccinations. (Walensky said she overrode the guidance to align the CDC with a separate recommendation from the FDA's advisory committee, and cited the narrow 9-6 vote against the recommendation.) Those scenes should have helped dispel the notion that they were acting as a rubber-stamp for any new shot Big Pharma produced. But the nation's top health official is now telling Americans that they should never have trusted the ACIP, which risks pushing more people to skip routine immunization. Shortly after the country declared measles eradicated in 2000, 94 percent of adults said childhood immunizations were extremely or very important. But that consensus has since weakened: 69 percent of Americans said the same in 2024. If changing opinion leads to declining vaccination rates, diseases that we successfully stamped out through vaccines to rebound — which is exactly what we are seeing now with measles. The US is experiencing its highest number of measles cases since the 1990s, nearing 1,200 as of this writing. One outbreak that accounts for most of those cases took off in a small Texas community where vaccination rates had fallen far below the 95-percent threshold that is considered necessary to stop the virus's spread. Other knock on effects could hurt Americans who still want to get vaccinated. Pharma companies, the target of so much of Kennedy's criticism, could decide to stop pursuing new vaccines if they believe the federal government will limit access as much as possible, shrinking the world's biggest pharmaceutical market. Vaccines are not big moneymakers for drug companies, and they have often relied on the US government's support to develop new ones. Kennedy, however, has canceled major vaccine development contracts during his first few months as health secretary, including a $700 million contract with Moderna, one of two companies that produced the mRNA Covid vaccines, to work on a universal flu shot. Kennedy has quickly disrupted decades of public health consensus. For now, the best reaction is, oddly enough, for patients and providers to take him at his word when he says people should not take medical advice from him — and make their own decisions in collaboration with their doctors.

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