When Gisel Mora married Orioles' baseball player Melvin Mora last summer, she had no illusions about the life she signed up for.
He proposed from a road trip, they married over the All-Star break, and she wanted to get pregnant early this year, because they knew it would be too stressful once the season started. Even her baby shower was held between a double-header at Camden Yards.
And when life handed her more than she bargained for, when her pregnancy turned into twins and then quintuplets, Gisel, 27, didn't hesitate. Even though her husband would be on the road half the time, she grabbed all of the promise of those babies, naming them, talking to them, staying strong through premature labor, bleeding and months of bed rest. When the infants were born in July, too early and desperately ill, she was alone, holding a nurse's hand, as calm and strong as she has been all summer.
For weeks now, she's juggled going to Johns Hopkins Hospital to visit the babies and grill the doctors, with caring for her 4-year-old daughter Tatiana, looking for a house and attending Orioles' games to root for her husband. This was a crucial season for Melvin, 29, who plays center field and shortstop, and she didn't want him to worry, so she's shielded him from the worst.
"I've got to be strong for Melvin," she said. "I've got to be strong for the babies."
Her mettle surprised veteran nurses and doctors. Only 5-foot-1 and 110 pounds, the black-haired beauty swallowed all the miserable medicine and instructions her obstetrician gave her as confidently as she wears her long, red fingernails and four-inch heels.
"Here is a woman who just has the weight of the world on her shoulders, and she had such strength," said nurse Lynn Kopelke, who has worked in labor and delivery at Hopkins for 18 years. "She just amazed me."
Melvin fell in love with that streak of energy and independence. Raised by Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn, Gisel grew up speaking Spanish and English and going to church three times a week. She met Melvin while working with a baseball agent who dealt with Latin American players. Later, when he took her to meet his family in rural Venezuela, the girl from New York City eagerly climbed on a pickup truck to bounce through the sugar cane fields.
Gisel has needed that toughness to see her tiny babies, born at between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 pounds, struggling for life in plastic incubators and to endure their roller-coaster courses. Hopkins doctors say having one baby in the neonatal intensive care unit is overwhelming; she shouldered the tests, medicines and worries of five.
