The Itulas lost hope.

After more than a dozen years of trying to get pregnant, the Nigerian couple thought they could never have a baby.

Now they have four.

“I was shocked,” said Nelly Itula, 40, as she sat Monday on her bed at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore City.

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“I started weeping. This is what we’ve been waiting for.”

“I thought it was a huge joke. I didn’t believe it,” said Fredericks Itula, 43.

“Now I’m the most fulfilled man on the planet.”

In December, Nelly Itula was visiting one of her sisters, Theresa Edward, in Owings Mills, when she started to feel sick. She visited a doctor, who told her she was pregnant with twins. In February, she learned she was carrying quadruplets.

Doctors told her to stay in the United States for the delivery to avoid a 15-hour flight that would have been too risky for a woman of her age carrying multiple babies.

In Nigeria, women who fail to conceive are stigmatized, and families often pressure husbands to find new wives, said Fredericks Itula, a lawyer.

But he stayed with his wife, prayed and selected four names for two boys and two girls — Frederick, Paul, Frieda and Pauletta — a decade ago.

He never dreamed he could assign all four names at once, but he did Friday, when his wife underwent a Caesarean section to deliver identical twin girls and fraternal twin boys.

In the glare of television cameras Monday, the couple proudly watched their newborns sleep in incubators labeled Baby A, B, C and D in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.

The babies, born nine weeks premature and weighing 2 to 3 pounds, needed respiratory support for their developing lungs but are growing stronger and should be discharged in four weeks, Dr. Thomas O’Brien said.

Quadruplets are rare but are becoming more common with the help of fertility drugs, which Nelly Itula took, O’Brien said.

“I’m a history teacher,” the mother said, a smile spreading across her face. “And I’m making history.”

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com