"You're Pregnant!"
Towards the end of May, beginning of June, my husband and I thought, "Let's see if we can have a baby." On Thursday, July 28th, a day before I was supposed to get my period, I started feeling cramps (I had spotted and thought I had had my period the previous month, but it was so hard to tell if and when I did), and was kind of a in a bad mood about it. But, the next day, nothing came. Nothing came on Saturday, either. And when nothing came on Sunday, my husband was antsy to get to the store and get a pregnancy test. I was just nervous. After I took it, and even though you are supposed to wait awhile to see the results, it popped up positive right away. (In hindsight, this is a symptom that you are pregnant with twins because your hormones are stronger). My husband just looked at me and said, "It looks like you're pregnant!".
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Telling Our Parents
I went to my doctor on Wednesday to confirm the pregnancy and they did a blood test to determine my due date. Thursday night we told my mom, with my family's tradition of giving a porcelain baby. I texted my sister a picture of the pregnancy test. Then we went to my father's house and told him and my step mother and step sister. Afterwards, we went to my in-laws and told them by giving them 2 baby bibs, each one exclaiming them a grandma or grandpa. Everyone was thrilled and we were so excited to finally be able to tell some people! I was only a little over 5 weeks, so we were going to wait to tell everyone else.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
So We Told a Few More People...
We decided to tell some people in my family because a lot of my cousins who we are very close to were going back to college and we wanted to be able to tell them in person. My mom arranged a cookout at her house, and I told everyone by giving my 89 year old grandfather a porcelain baby, which told everyone without having to say anything. Everyone was so excited, I think we went deaf with all the screaming.
Saturday-Sunday, August 13th & 14th, 2011
Uh oh...
Saturday I noticed some spotting, it was very light, but I freaked out and didn't tell anyone, not even my husband. I looked up spotting on different pregnancy sites on my phone because I didn't want to risk anyone seeing me looking it up on any computer. Some people said it was normal, almost everyone said to go to your doctor, and others said it was the beginning of a miscarriage. But, it was such a little amount and I had been so busy that week- shopping, running on the treadmill, etc. that some people said that too much activity can cause it, too. Then Sunday, I had cramps- severe, numbing cramps, and a little more spotting. People said that with cramping and spotting together- go to the doctor or hospital immediately. I told my husband, we looked up more information online, a lot of people said that both were signs of miscarriage but all a doctor will do is see if there is a heartbeat, that there is nothing you can do. I think I saw about 4 stories where people said when they went to the doctor, they found out they were pregnant with multiples, so that always stuck in my mind. We were at our family's shore home, and not close to home, so we decided to call the doctor the following morning.
Monday, August 15, 2011
"Can I Ask You Guys a Question?"
I called the doctor the minute they opened and they had me come right in to get checked out. My doctor examined me, said everything appeared to be fine, but he gave me a script for an ultrasound. He sent me over to the radiology unit of the hospital, because they could take me sooner (he no longer delivers babies, so I was in the process of checking out new doctors for delivery). My husband and I were so nervous and I was ready to burst into tears at any moment. When the girl took us back into the room, and started rubbing the wand over my stomach, I just stared up at the ceiling, not able to look, and my husband sat in a chair towards the end of the table. She warned us that because it was so early in the pregnancy, we would most likely not be able to see anything, but she would be able to detect a heartbeat. After a minute or 2, she said, "Well here's a heartbeat...", but I still did not feel relieved and did not look at the screen. I don't know why I didn't feel better, maybe it was her tone of voice, she didn't seem excited or satisfied either, I guess. Then she asked if she could do an internal sonogram, and I said, "Sure."
Once I relieved myself in the bathroom, I realized I did feel a little better, but I was concerned as to why she was going to do a different sonogram. Once I was back on the table and she was studying the screen for awhile, she says, "Can I ask you guys a question?" My husband and I looked at each other and said, "Sure....." and she asks, "Do twins run in your family?" My husband and I looked at each and then I looked at her, and she was smiling! I looked at the screen and saw 2 little lima beans jumping around. "There's 2 in here." she says. (the only set of twins from my family were from my father's side). My husband and I just laughed and smiled. It was a day from starting at one emotional extreme- preparing myself for loss to the other- having 2 babies!
She said they were identical because they were in the same sac. We left the office laughing and smiling.
Friday, September 23, 2011
"You Have Decisions To Make"
So at the first trimester screen, Baby A looked wonderful, but when the sonogram technician got to Baby B, she went silent, so we knew something was wrong. When the doctor came in to talk to us, we knew it was going to be bad news. She told us her name, and jumped into a question asking session, "Do you know why you're here? Do you know what this test is? What are we measuring? What are you thinking?" We were so anxious for her to just spit it out, my mind was swimming and I could not believe she would not just get to the bad news. She went on to tell us that Baby B most likely had down syndrome or some other chromosomal abnormality, and there was possibly a risk to harming Baby A, and that we were going to have a lot of important decisions to make. After she told us, and we're soaking it in, she asks, "Why aren't you freaking out?" I felt like a child being reprimanded for something I did wrong. And what did she want me to do? Scream and cry at her? What would that have done?
We left in such a fog, but we agreed to meet with a genetics counselor on Tuesday and maybe possibly have a CVS (chorionic villus sampling- extracting DNA from the placenta) done to see if there was something wrong with both babies.
One of the most important things she told us was the babies were monochorionic diamniotic, meaning the they were identical and in the same sac, but separated by a membrane (they pointed out a membrane, we couldn't really tell what it was, but they said it was there)- a huge factor in the health of our babies, and we had passed it... or so we thought it.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
A CVS.... twice
So Tuesday we met with the genetic counselor, and she made it seem like the percentage was not that bad, which it really wasn't. Once we had gotten home that Friday, we had time to calm down and think and we realized that these numbers the doctor had thrown out at us were not that bad. We went through our family history, our own medical history, everything. We decided to go through with the CVS because we were afraid of what could happen to Baby A. At the time, we were made to believe that depending on the chromosomal abnormality, there could be potential harm to Baby A as a result of Baby B.
They gave me water to chug down so they could do an ultrasound to monitor the babies and see what they were doing with a CVS. This doctor was muh more courteous and calm about the whole situation. So they went in, but were having a hard time seeing the placenta, so I was told to empty my bladder, and they were going to have to go through my stomach. When I came back, and they began the ultrasound again, they could see the placenta! They had never heard of that before, so they didn't have to go through my stomach and they were successfully able to extract DNA. Now we just had to wait for the results, 2-4 weeks!
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Crying in the Produce Department
That Tuesday, I was feeling pretty good, it had been a long couple of weeks, but I thought I'd make a nice dinner and try and relax. As I was walking through the produce department of our local grocery store, I see a number come up on my phone and I recognized it as one of the hospital numbers. When I picked up and they asked for me, I could tell the woman had a happy tone and I started shaking. She told me the results came back normal! I started crying right there at my cart. She asked if I wanted to know the sex, and I had not originally, because I didn't care at all, but I knew my husband wanted to know. I said, "Yes" and she told me we were having boys! I was so excited and emotionally crazy that I just kept crying. After I hung up I knew I wanted to tell my husband in a special way and I didn't know what to do, I didn't just want to tell him over the phone. Everyone was baking a two-tier cake and putting blue or pink frosting in the middle, but I wanted to do something different. But I also wanted to get to my car and cry in private. I ran to the Jell-o asile and grabbed some blue Jell-o, then ran over to get some whipped cream. I broke down in my car and the whole way home.
I didn't tell anyone! It was so hard because I knew everyone was waiting anxiously to hear something- our families, our friends, and our co-workers. I made the Jell-o and split it between 2 martini glasses. When my husband got home, my plan was to eat dinner, and then give him the glasses, but I couldn't stop smiling. I told him I had a surprise for him so I told him to get out of the kitchen, I squirted the whipped cream on the Jell-o and handed him a glass. He says, "I didn't know you liked blue Jell-o." I smiled and said, "This is in celebration of our two healthy boys." He just looked at me and said, "They're healthy?" And I said "Yes!" We took pictures of the martini glasses and texted it to our family(so no one found out before anyone else) with the caption, "Celebrating 2 Healthy Boys". After hours of phone calls, we texted it to our friends. It was a huge weight off our shoulders and we barely ate the dinner I had made.
But after our experience with that hospital and that doctor (she was not my regular doctor, but someone who worked in her practice) we decided to go to a multiples specialist and high risk doctor on the recommendation from a friend.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
They Can't Find the Membrane
I loved my new doctor, she was sharp, to the point, no bull, but she knew what she was doing and didn't treat my like a child- exactly what I wanted. I was able to have a sonogram before every appointment, which was scheduled for every 2 weeks. But at this doctor, they had not been able to find the membrane. No one seemed bothered by it, the prime time to see it was the time of we have termed the "Horrible Appointment", but this doctor wanted to see it- she didn't want to rely on someone else, which I was glad about.
On this particular day, after my regular sonogram, she went in herself and looked with the technician for a membrane. There were times where they thought they saw something, but then it vanished. They scheduled me to see a specialist in the Labor and Delivery Unit in 2 weeks. My babies might actually be Monochorionic Monoamniotic. My doctor explained that we would set up a plan that would put me in the hospital and on steroids around 26-28 weeks, and that she would not let me deliver past 32 weeks. I was due April 7th, but now I would be having them in mid-February. That old doctor flipped out about something that ended up not being an issue, but somehow missed something that could effect the rest of my pregnancy. Lovely.
We decided to only tell our parents about this until it was completely necessary to explain all the details to everyone. It was a hard decision to make because this was over the Thanksgiving holiday and everyone wanted to talk about the babies, and everyone was so thankful that everything was going so well, and everyone wanted to talk about baby showers, and "how come you haven't registered?", and "why haven't you worked on the nursery?" I wanted to cry and scream that everything was not ok, but it was our decision not to tell everyone until we had to.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Momos
The first place we went on the 29th was the NICU to talk to the director. He was very pleasant and optimistic. He gave us the statistics/ mortality rates of babies born at various weeks- twin, white boys being worst case scenario-ours! If the boys were born at 24 weeks, for example, there was only like a 15% chance of them surviving, where it would have been about 25% for girls (these are not exact numbers, I'm just going from memory). At around 28 weeks, the probability of survival went up significantly, and at 32 weeks, there was over a 95% chance of survival- although there would still be time spent in the NICU and monitoring done throughout their childhood and later. We were told the main things they look for in the NICU are body temperature and weight.
Then we saw the specialist for another sonogram.....
So the specialist could not find a membrane and we really did have decisions to make now. The hard part is that there is not a whole lot of information or advice to go off of. We were officially having "Momo's", our 1 in 30,000 set of identical twins. And most momo's are girls! And why did they say there was a membrane before? Could it have ruptured during the CVS? Was there never a membrane? Was there still one and they just couldn't see it?
Then we met with our doctor to talk about a plan...
My doctor highly recommended doing steroids around 26 weeks and admission to the hospital at 28 weeks. There are many people online who seem to be admitted a lot earlier. Inpatient care significantly increases chances for survival, and some people go in at 25, 24, or even 23 weeks, but these twins also seem to make it to 32 weeks. Do they make it to 32 weeks because of inpatient care? Steroids? And why did they at one time see a membrane between our babies? It's hard knowing something could go wrong so quickly, but not really having too many ways to stop it. I would have gone in that second if I knew my babies would be fine, but that is not always the case.
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