Octomom Nadya Suleman kept popping out babies even after doctors diagnosed her with paranoia, depression, wild mood swings and post-traumatic stress syndrome.
But as far as the single California mother is concerned, she’s only one kind of crazy – baby crazy.
“All I wanted was children,” she told NBC. “I wanted to be a mom. That’s all I ever wanted in my life.”
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In the days since giving birth to only the second set of living octuplets ever, Suleman has been criticized for putting her own whims ahead of the interests of her children.
But to the unemployed mother who lives in the home of her divorced parents, it is those who have only two or three kids who are often the selfish ones.
“Everything I do, I’ll stop my life for them and be present with them. And hold them,” she said. “And how many parents do that? I’m sure there are many that do, but many don’t. And that’s unfortunate. That is selfish.”
Suleman says she has a plan to earn enough money to raise her 14 kids.
In the fall, when her octuplets are just over 6 months old, she plans to return to Cal State Fullerton, where she is completing a master’s in counseling, and send her children to the day-care center there, she told NBC.
Though NBC says it did not pay for the exclusive interview, Suleman’s mother has indicated she plans to earn money from her newfound notoriety.
“I know I’ll be able to afford them when I’m done with my schooling,” Nadya Suleman said.
Suleman had been supporting herself in part on the more than $165,000 in disability payments she collected between 2002 and 2008 for a work injury she sustained in 1999, according to workers compensation and medical records made public this week.
She contends that all 14 of her children were conceived through in vitro fertilization, and all were fathered using sperm from the same donor, whom she would identify only as “a friend.”
She told NBC that in each of her six pregnancies, doctors transferred six embryos back into her uterus. And although she has 2-year-old twins, prior to the octuplets, each pregnancy was a singleton.
Under standard practice, fertility doctors do not transfer more than two embryos, or three if they are frozen, for a woman under age 35, doctors said.
Suleman contends that all six embryos were necessary due to her particular condition, and in this instance two of those embryos divided into identical twins.
California’s medical board says it is investigating Suleman’s doctor, who has not been identified.
In 1995, she had her first of three ectopic pregnancies, a dangerous condition in which an egg is fertilized within the fallopian tubes and normally ends in miscarriage.
She married Marcos Gutierrez in 1996 and earned a psychiatric technician license from Mount San Antonio College.
During a riot in 1999 at the Metropolitan State Hospital, the psychiatric facility where she worked, a female patient flipped over a desk, which landed on Suleman’s back, causing a herniated disc and years of endless pain.
The injury was partly to blame for her split with Gutierrez in 2000, she said.
“I didn’t want to keep bringing him down,” Suleman said, according to the LA Times.
She never stopped trying to get pregnant.
She says she needed more and more kids to compensate for her growing up an only child in a “dysfunctional” home.
When she finally did get pregnant, her joy was mixed with darkness.
“It was during that time I became depressed and I just wanted to die,” she said, according to medical records.
She also suffered bouts of paranoia during which she worried that the pregnancy would result in miscarriage and later that her kids would be kidnapped.
“I thought I would jinx it,” Suleman told doctors, according to the LA Times.
“It’s the most wonderful, best thing that’s ever happened in my life . . . I was still thinking it’s too good to be true . . . When you have a history of miscarriages, you think it will take a miracle.”
Doctors said in the report that her depression was the result of “the powerful and uncontrollable emotions associated with her pregnancy.”
Others diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Later, as a parent, she swung from joy to misery and back again and was frequently convinced something terrible would happen to her children.
“My husband or my mother has to take me almost everywhere,” she told one of the doctors.
When she decided to get pregnant again last year, she hoped for one baby, but was thrilled to have eight, her mother said.
Suleman’s publicist, Mike Furtney, said Thursday that Suleman was “feeling great” and looking forward to being reunited with her octuplets, who are expected to remain in the hospital for several more weeks.
Additional reporting by David Finnigin and Post Wire Services