It's Twins!

Absolutely panic-stricken.

That is what I felt when I found out I was having twins. People ask me this all the time. Was I surprised when I found out? No, but I was deer-in-headlights, sick to my stomach, dizzyingly, head in my hands in fear, panic-stricken.

Doing the kid thing in general was a huge jump off a dark cliff into the abyss of the unknown for me. I will backtrack and get to that part of the story later. But although I did use Intrauterine insemination, and I did take a very small dose of clomid prior to my cycle in which I conceived; I had a pre-insemination ultrasound of my ovaries done a day prior to the IUI. This was in part to make sure I was ovulating, and also to make sure that I would not have multiples.

One egg. ONE. ONE EGG! was waiting and ready to go.

"No multiples this cycle," my Reproductive Endocrinologist reported. Great. On April 15, 2004. D and I go downtown. He takes a statistics midterm while I sit in Seattle's Best Coffee, then we go get me knocked up.

Eight days later, I'm swimming laps in the pool at my gym, and I feel weird. I know I'm pregnant, but I don't believe me.

Fourteen days later, the first day I'm allowed to test, I get up at 5:30 and pee on the stick. It is ever so slightly blue. I go wake D up by shoving the stick I just peed on in his face and shouting, "What do you see?!?!"

After a few minutes of squinting and turning on lights and holding the stick up to the window, he says, "I don't know, it is kind of blue. Can you be kind of pregnant?"

I read the directions 200 times. The part where it says, "Any shade of blue is an indication of a positive result" resonates in my mind. But--a little back story here--I have kidney disease that makes my pee do weird things to test strips. I had to do the clomid and also have an HCG injection because the ovulation test sticks you are supposed to use when you do IUI indicated that I was always ovulating EVERY DAY OF THE MONTH. This is why I had to have a pre-IUI scan. So, I'm thinking that this could be happening again, or maybe its the HCG shot. I can't possibly be pregnant. Those things just don't happen to me.

So I go to the drug store and buy five more pregnancy tests. I took another one that afternoon. Blue. Over the next four days I take one test every morning. Blue. Darker Blue. Even Darker Blue. Even More Darker Blue. Even More Darker Blue Than The Control Line Blue. Each day I lay them out on the bathroom counter and go back in to stare at them 28 times a day in disbelief.

Finally, I get up the nerve to call my Doctor. "I think I'm pregnant," some foreign voice that can't possibly be coming out of my mouth says. I have to come in for two blood tests three days apart to confirm.

First test: HCG Level over 4000. "That's awful high, isn't it? Aren't those numbers indicative of multiples?" "No, no, no," I'm reassured by the nurse. "All women are different."

Second Test: HCG Level over 10,000 and I'm less than five weeks pregnant. "My GAWD!" I gasp, "I'm all kinds of pregnant. Isn't that a sign of multiples? Could my one egg have split?" "No, it doesn't mean multiples." says the tech. "We'll just have to wait and see."

At five weeks, I go in for my first ultrasound. Now picture it. I'm visually impaired and in a dark room. I'm lying in the ever-so-dignified "stirrup" position and for some reason that escapes me now, I only had one hearing aid in. D and the doctor are both down at my nether end looking up at me and the screen which I can't see. I'm all uncomfortable due to the fact that I'm nauseous, I can't see or hear what is going on, and, oh, yeah, there is a gigantic protruding ultrasound transducer being whipped around in my vagina like the guy is drilling for the last bit of peanut butter out of the bottom of the jar.

I hear the doctor say, "there's the first one." And I hear D say, "The first one? you only found one, right?" And the doctor says, "so far." What? What! So FAR, how big is it up there, you've been going after that peanut butter for, like, ten minutes now.

Then there was more talking that I didn't hear. Then I heard static coming from the ultrasound machine which slowly morphed itself into a heartbeat. It took me a second to realize...that is MY BABY'S heartbeat! Oh, MY GOD! For the first time, I actually believed I was pregnant.

I forgot about "So Far" because I was so elated over the heartbeat. The doctor  continued talking and poking and I couldn't keep track of what was going on. Then all the sudden, I heard it again. The Heartbeat! Only for a few seconds. Way too short of time. Then slowly I came to wonder if this was the same heartbeat or a second one. I heard in D's voice that he had some anxiety but I wasn't sure what they were saying. All I wanted to do then was to get this over with and sit up and find out what was going on.

When I was allowed to sit up, the doctor and nurse were all smiles and with congratulations, while D looked pale and like he was fake smiling.

"TWO!" The doctor said. "Congratulations!" said the nurse. "Great Job!" They both said as if I had worked extra hard to ensure that two sperm found eggs on purpose.

And then they walked out of the room and I burst into tears. This was bad. This was very, very bad. I have kidney disease. A single pregnancy was high risk for me, what would my body do with two? Would I miscarry? Would I go into kidney failure and die? Would I deliver them prematurely and they would die? Would they be born with severe disabilities? Would I be able to handle two children as a deaf/blind woman who cares for a quadriplegic? Would I be able to afford two?

The nurse gave me a printout of two little circles that were to become my children. She told me to keep the news quiet for a while because many times one twin won't survive the first few weeks. I was a weird combination of relieved and worried when she said that.

I stared at the picture all the way home and cried while D just drove. I'd taken a huge risk in becoming pregnant. I'd had surgery to remove cysts, there was questions on whether I would even be able to get pregnant at all, and now I'd done and gotten myself pregnant with twins. How the hell could that have happened? I felt like a terrible, irresponsible person.

For about three days, I brooded and cried and brooded some more. I was in a terrible state of depression for about a week. I just thought over and over that I couldn't handle this. I can't do this. My mom died the year before, my sister is far away and no help. Who knows what D's family will think. What if I die and the babies live? What if I should become more disabled upon going through the pregnancy? What should I do?

I thought about abortion. (Hate mail cometh.) My opinion about abortion before this was that I never thought I would have one. I certainly didn't approve of abortion as a form of birth control to be used repeatedly in lieu of other means. But other than those thoughts, I avoided the subject. When I was put in this situation where my body might fail both me and my babies because of the extra burden of twins, that all three of us could die or become very ill, I suddenly WAS SO VERY GLAD I LIVED IN A COUNTRY WHERE I WAS FREE TO CONTEMPLATE THIS DECISION MYSELF. Even though I had already heard the heartbeats and seen their little miraculous little beginning circles of life in the ultrasound picture, even though I already loved and cared about them, their well-being was completely intertwined with my life and my body. Pregnancy, I have found, is incredibly hard work and taxing on the mother. Although you can say life starts at conception--and I think it does--those lives are on total life support and the mother is the life support machine, so to speak. My perinatologist once said when I was worried about the babies getting enough food because of my morning sickness, that the babies are parasites, they will take whatever they need from the mother. This may be an ugly way to put it, but every day of my pregnancy was a difficult sacrifice to help my little guys stay on life support. I can't imagine anyone else being able to decide for me except me that I have to make that sacrifice.

In the end, the fact that I COULD consider abortion was the very thing that helped me decide, "YES! I want to keep these babies. I will do whatever it takes to keep them alive. I will sit for nine months in the hospital on bed rest, I will go on dialysis, I will have a kidney transplant, I will eat spinach and liver everyday, I will pee in a jug and have my kidneys analyzed every week, I will make arrangements for adoption if I become to ill to care for them, I will do whatever it takes." Given the choice to do this or not, made me be able to decide without a doubt that I would and could do it.

I also mulled adoption for a bit, but that is a story for another time. The end of this story about the twins is this:

Every single day, every moment of the day, from the time I wake up till the time I go to sleep I thank God, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, the Dali Lama, Sai Baba, the higher power, the holy spirit, the North, the South, the East and West, the sun, the moon and the stars, the take your pick, that I have these children. I cannot imagine having one without the other, I could not pick between them if a gun was put to my head, I have been blessed beyond measure because of my Aaron and Naim in my life. I don't feel guilty that I was scared of having them, I'm glad I went through that so I can see how far we've come, how we rose to the challenge, and how beautiful the result. I CHOSE to have these guys. And it is far and away the best decision I've ever made in my entire life.

P.S. My kidneys made it through the pregnancy, but my eyes took some serious damage. More on that later, but still...I'd rather be deaf/blind and have them that be totally able bodied and not have children at all.

Comments

Wow.

[gawdessness]

No hate mail from here.
Just thought I'd get that in first :).
Thanks for sharing your stories here.

[Michelle]

Wow..that is amazing. I feel lucky that you had those choices too. I'm glad what you picked turned out to be the right choice for you.

[cluttergirl]

Wow. That is quite the story! Thanks so much for sharing it. And what great kids you have too! They just BOTH wanted to be with you and D. BTW D is a cutie. :D Also I wanted to mention that while I was at Musicfest I saw a deaf mom with a hearing daughter. It was cool to see them interact... the mom getting her kid to shower (it's all outside), them both at the night concert. Very cool.