The Whole Story

So, it was one year ago today that my suspicions were confirmed. Something was different about my pregnancy. Last year on September 5th we found out we were having twins. When the tech told us, I asked if they were Siamese because the tech's face was so scared. She thought I was an idiot and said no. Phew.

Oh wait, there is more to the story. Here's what I was too emotional to ever talk about before, but just think you might be interested to know. The lady said that Nate had a single umbilical artery (SUA), and that could cause him to be smaller and not thrive, and could mean there were "other issues." They sent us over to a specialist group, whom I will not name, for more testing.

The other group also detected a condition called twin-twin-transfusion syndrome (TTTS.) Basically, the just of it is that the babies have crossover blood supply on the placenta, and one leaches off the other. The end result is that the recipient takes too much from the donor, and causes the donor to go into failure to thrive and/or, the recipient has so much blood volume it enlarges his heart and causes him to go into congestive heart failure. If one of the babies died, the sudden drop in shared blood pressure would cause the other to die almost immediately.

So, what to do? To manage TTTS, they gave us three options:
1- when the size difference between the sacks got big enough, they could do amneosentesis and pull fluid out of the big one to even things out and it should help give the smaller guy more room to grow. However, they will only do this up to 24 weeks and we were at 20.
2- there was a laser surgery that can be done to the placenta to seperate the crossover supply.
3- clamp off the donor's cord so that he would pass but there would be no change in blood pressure, thus allowing one to survive.

Wow.

I was voting for option one or two, preferrably two because the risks associated with it were lower.

The next week, we saw the guy in the group who treated this sort of situation, Dr. Doesn't-have-a-heart. He said that there was one more complication. Both babies umbilical cords were on the same side of the placenta. Sort of the "perfect storm." The laser procedure wouldn't work because if they did that, there wouldn't be enough blood supply for the donor to take from. He suggested that the only option I had left was to "occlude" the donor's cord. By doing this, it would ensure a safe environment for the other baby.

Guess what I did? I cried and cried and cried. Suprising? No. We left the office saying that we weren't going to make a decision yet. On the way home, Jason made the decision I had wanted to say, but felt selfish saying. "All or nothing." I felt guilty for choosing to do nothing, and felt like I should be okay with one baby because after all, I had only known about the second one for a week. I knew that there was no way I could let one go.

Okay, here's where I get churchy. I knew that Heavenly Father knew me and knew what I could handle. He knew that I wouldn't be able to abort one baby, and so I needed to trust Him. If both babies pulled through okay, it would be a blessing. I knew that if I lost both babies, it would be traumatic, but it was still all part of Heavenly Father's plan for me, and he wanted me to be happy. At home, I went into the front room, opened up the plastic wrap on the church magazines and fished out the Ensign. I looked at the table of contents and turned to a page that had the story of a couple who had gone through the same choice we were given. Their babies had made it through, though not without a lot of trouble. Coincidence? I don't think so. It reconfirmed to me that I could do this.

So, on we went with life. I was put on bedrest, on a high calorie high protien diet (um, lots of Ensure, and I love it,) and was at the doctor's office twice a week for ultrasounds. It was quite the rollercoaster. Each visit was completely opposite of the last. "I'm very concerned about the reverse doppler flow," "Wow, this looks like a different baby, you could make it to 36 weeks," "Things are looking bad for baby B, by occluding the cord, we'd ensure A's safety," and so on. October 2008 was possibly the longest month of my life. Back and forth between the hospital, doctor and bedrest, and then finally admitted into the hospital to stay. It was more of the same, good, bad, good, bad, with daily ultrasounds and 24 hour monitoring and the regular, "As a doctor, I need to inform you what the best choice for your baby is." The doctor that I disliked the most seemed to be on most often and was always very negative, saying that baby B was not going to function "normally" anyways and probably had chromosomal abnormalities and a messed up face.

On Monday, November 10th, 9 weeks after this whole ordeal had started, I was tired of being in the hospital and didn't take a shower. Not so good timing on my part. That afternoon lady Dr. Doesn't-have-a-heart ran into the room and said that B was in distress and we had to deliver NOW. So, I don't trust the lady so much and told her I wanted to talk to the other doctor on staff. Ugh, it was the 3rd one in line of my not liking-ness. I called Jason and told him to head on down so we could talk it over with them. There was no talking it over. It was like on Cinderella when the birds and mice get her ready for the ball with the pink dress. My room was immediately filled with people, undressing me, unhooking my bed, hooking me up to more crap and going crazy. I asked how long a c-section takes. They said, "usually about an hour, but you'll be a lot faster than that." Jason still wasn't there and they asked if they needed to wait. I told them to get everything ready so if they needed to pull them out they could, but try to keep 'em in until he got there. In walked Jason. He sat down by my head, and ta-da, here is baby A.... pause maybe a minute... here's baby B.

Guess what? Baby B was perfect. He had a nose.
How else could he hold up his genius baby glasses?


Reese daydreams about what it would have been like to not have someone constantly pulling and chewing on his G-tube and tackling him, but I think he really would be sad without his little brother.Sorry that was long. I did want to post about it because when this was all going down, I googled the different conditions and found a girl's blog that had the same thing the year before. I emailed her and asked her a ton of questions and it was so reassuring to have someone who had been there before.