This is it. The day my twins were born. Four years ago today, at 5:45 and 5:46 to be exact, our long journey through infertility had finally ended, and the crazy journey of parenthood had begun. I know how differently it could have all have gone. I may never have gotten pregnant, we might not have had the luck to have insurance to try IVF in the first place. One out of four pregnancies end in the first trimester, roughly one third of twin pregnancies reduce to a singleton pregnancy. I could have developed any number of pregnancy complications, or I could have lost one or both of them during delivery. I was certainly at high risk. I was 35, pregnant with twins, and I had intensive uterine surgery to remove a fibroid a year earlier, leaving me at a much higher risk for uterine rupture. In my mind I didn't believe that I would be bringing them home, let alone full term and full size at 38 weeks gestation.
I have never had the opportunity to tell their birth story in full. Among our family and friends it has become more about my husband and his crazy running around that night than about the twins arrival. Granted, his part of the story is upbeat and funny, the kind of thing that would fit right into a modern romantic comedy. My story is different, it is passive and filled with sudden fear and turmoil...a lot of things being done to me and around me without having the full picture of what was going on.
I went in to my OB at 1:30 in the afternoon for a routine appointment. It was a Tuesday, and it was unseasonably warm and rainy. After my appointment, I had a routine non stress test for the twins in the maternity ward of the hospital at 4:30. I remember waddling from my OB to the ward thinking about going home and what I would have for dinner. It was starting to get dark. I had no idea that it would be four days before I stepped outside again, and that it would be the last hour I was pregnant. My scheduled C section wasn't for another week, and my due date was the week after that.
I got to the ward, joked with the ladies at the desk, and then went through the usual routine. The room set aside for NST's was little more than a closet. It had three beds crammed in it, a TV, and an attached bath. It also had a bunch of old IV stands and stuff gathering dust, and a tiny ultrasound machine and fetal monitor. I used the bathroom and put on the stretchy belly band and got "comfortable" on one of the beds. Then the fun began. The nurses put on a blood pressure cuff and monitor for contractions, and then started to track the twins heartbeats. First they found one, then the other, but they couldn't catch both of them at the same time. Then their heartbeats weren't accelerating, so they had me drink ice water and banged metal bed pans. All of this was a normal NST for me. Then alarms began to go off. The nurses ran in and made me turn onto my left side. They said my blood pressure had spiked. Then they started staring at one of the monitors. "Did you feel that?" they asked. "What???". "How about THAT?!" they asked. Nope and nope. Apparently I was having whopping contractions but couldn't feel them. Then the nurses turned me back onto my back, and lost twin B's heartbeat. Then the blood pressure monitor began to wail again. There was a lot of rushing of nurses back and forth. Everyone had on their serious faces. The very young nurse told me not to worry, that she was sure the baby was fine, they just couldn't find him. I laughed. "You can't find him" I said "But I can". They were both very active and kicking like crazy.
Then the doctor came in. You can wait, he said, until your pre op appointment on Thursday....OR...we can take them now. Huh? All the hustle and bustle was beginning to make sense to me then. I could tell they didn't want me to go home. I had a feeling I would be right back there in a few hours anyway, and maybe not in very good shape. I said "Sure...take them now." I expected to be able to go home, grab my bag, and come back...it wasn't an emergency. But oh no. The nurses went into overdrive and I began to quietly panic. I needed to contact my husband. They handed me the hospital phone, but it wasn't plugged in. Finally after ten minutes or so, one of the nurses plugged it in for me. Then if was off to the races. I don't remember much of what happened next. I don't recall if I walked to the OR, or if I was on a gurney. I only vaguely remember taking off my clothes to put on a johnny, leaving my clothes and purse in a messy pile. I remember sitting on the bed to get the epidural, and that it was VERY hot in the OR...stifling even, and that the doctors and nurses were all complaining about it and fiddling with the thermostat. I remember asking over and over about my husband, and them telling me that he had gone to get the camera and he would be there any minute. The camera?? WTF?
Then my husband showed up and they started cutting. He tells me that there was already a lot of blood on the floor, they must have already started. Within minutes I heard DA's cries, and then NB"S. I felt sick and I couldn't breath...I remember that. But everything is pretty much a blur until I woke up in my hospital room.
My husband's part of the story involves him leaving work and speeding to the hospital, he put on a set of scrubs, then he went to the OR. The doctor asked him about the camera, and he told them he didn't have it. Then he said that we live right across the street. He put his street clothes on over his scrubs, ran to get the camera, came back, and put yet another set of scrubs on over his clothes...and scrubs...and almost dropped from heat exhaustion because it was 90 in the OR.
Scary. Funny. Ordinary everyday miracle. My boys. Five years of trying, four rounds of IVF, one major abdominal surgery and one miscarriage later. Thirty eight weeks gestation...6 lbs 9 oz and 7lbs 1 oz of healthy, bouncy baby boy. And totally worth every penny, every heartache, every shot, all the fear and hope....my everything.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Home is Where the Heart Is
Memorial Day my husband and marked our 7th year living in our house. I remember that day like it was yesterday. All our friends and relatives that could come were here helping us pack up and empty the truck. D and my sister went out for pizzas and didn't come back...for hours. The pizza parlor's ovens were broken and they didn't want to tell us, so they stalled because they wanted the huge order. They ended up going across town to another place while I held down the fort keeping everyone happy with beer.
After my hubby and sister came back victorious with pizzas in hand, everyone ate and sat on our beautiful wrap around porch watching my BIL try and get the moving van out of our driveway and turned around. It was an impossible task, it turned out, but amusing to watch. Because our street is so narrow the van couldn't be turned enough without driving onto someone's lawn. The road is also not in the best shape, there is a bit of a hump in the middle of it, which (now) has got some permanent, huge grooves in it from the truck's tailgate. BIL then went down the street asking our soon to be neighbors if he could pull the truck in THEIR driveways and see if he could pull the turnaround. No dice. Low wires and cars parked in the street thwarted all attempts. There were many guys in the street waving him on and guiding him. It was quite the entertainment. Eventually we all gave up. D and I ended up waking up at 4 in the morning so that we could back the truck all the way down our street and into the busy road at the end of it. It is the only time the road has no traffic, it turns out. I followed him to the local mini mall where D left the giant truck in the parking lot and then I brought him back so we could crash for a few more hours. We spent the rest of the day returning the truck, setting up our living room so that it was livable, and finally retrieving our pets from our old home and introducing them to the new one. On Wednesday I would drive D to the airport so he could go back to work in Virginia. He wouldn't be back in our new home for months.
Apart from having to unpack everything myself, I enjoyed the months alone to putter about our new house and yard. It gave me time to put my mental house in order along with the physical one. Our search for the perfect house for us had been one fraught with hope and compromises, a great deal of stress and more than a few tears shed. It didn't help that our search for a home was tangled up in the process of trying to start a family.
While trying to buy a house we were heartbroken and thwarted in our attempts several times. The most painful attempt was a fairly large and broken down Victorian, that in spite of its ugliness and awkward placement had become my heart's desire. Unfortunately, it was not to be. While walking through the house I had been able to see with my mind's eye what our children would look like, I could practically hear them running around upstairs, I could see their shoes, knee pads, and back packs lined up on the back stairway. The tiny room off of the master bedroom would make the perfect nursery. I had to have this place, because to not have it would be to accept that that family I saw wasn't to be...I had to do what I could to make that house ours so our family could come into being.
But no amount of hoping, wishing, and begging the Universe was going to make it mine. The house was in much too need of repair, and our lender wouldn't agree to let us burden ourselves with a (possibly) collapsing money pit. It was our second set back, and it wasn't going to be our last. We sank into despair for awhile and gave up looking. On the family building front, we were also at a stand still. After two years of trying, we had gone to specialists to figure out what was holding us back, and issues seemed to be twofold. I had a large fibroid that had taken up residence, which may or may not be affecting matters, and D's sperm was total, complete, garbage. The crappy sperm was blamed for our infertility, and we were told, that without a doubt, moving onto IVF was our only option. But before we could do that, we had to go to meeting upon meeting...with doctors, psychologists, money and insurance people, shot training and genetic counseling, blood work, and visits to an Ob/Gyn for me and a Urologist for D. The Infertility Circus would set us back another year before we could get started.
During that time we found the house that would be our home. It had all the lovely historic touches we craved, including a beautiful working fireplace...and it was in perfect shape. It was situated on a quiet, dead end street, with a 1/4 acre back yard...wooded and private. As we walked through the house we could hear kids playing in the street. But, it was small. Quaint, cute, adorable, cozy, whatever our real estate agent wanted to call it, it was small. Two bedrooms one bath, dining room, living room, kitchen...that was it. Tried as I might I couldn't picture a family living here. The sellers had two young children and needed to move on. This was a place for empty nesters, newly weds, a twenty-something just starting out. Buying this place was admitting to ourselves that we couldn't see the whole family thing working out for us, not for a long time, at any rate. We walked around the back and pointed to where a new addition could maybe, possibly be added, "when the time came". But I could tell by my husband's face that we were kidding ourselves. We would live in this place until our old age, with the sounds of other people's kids all around us, entertaining our families in the dining room with it's lovely built-ins, enjoying a cocktail in front of a roaring, non child-friendly fire with cats on our laps. It was a fine house, it would be a fine life, it just wasn't the one I wanted.
I suppose, that by the title of this blog, anyone can tell that things worked out differently than I expected. After major surgery to remove the fibroid, 4 rounds of IVF, and one heartbreaking miscarriage, we had twin boys. We started having fires only after the boys went to sleep, and the laundry in the basement drove me crazy. Then we started to potty train, and the 1 bathroom all the way on the second floor pushed us to have a potty chair in the living room 24/7. Then, in what may appear to be total madness, we decided to try for a third child. Understand...we didn't think it would work. We certainly didn't think it would happen quickly. We would have all the time in the world to reasses our housing situation. But it did work, quickly, after one failed FET attempt and one fresh IVF cycle a couple of months later, we were pregnant. Nearly fertile, of us, I have to say.
Now we are crammed...stuffed...full to bursting in our little house. Thankfully, joyfully, sadly full.
After my hubby and sister came back victorious with pizzas in hand, everyone ate and sat on our beautiful wrap around porch watching my BIL try and get the moving van out of our driveway and turned around. It was an impossible task, it turned out, but amusing to watch. Because our street is so narrow the van couldn't be turned enough without driving onto someone's lawn. The road is also not in the best shape, there is a bit of a hump in the middle of it, which (now) has got some permanent, huge grooves in it from the truck's tailgate. BIL then went down the street asking our soon to be neighbors if he could pull the truck in THEIR driveways and see if he could pull the turnaround. No dice. Low wires and cars parked in the street thwarted all attempts. There were many guys in the street waving him on and guiding him. It was quite the entertainment. Eventually we all gave up. D and I ended up waking up at 4 in the morning so that we could back the truck all the way down our street and into the busy road at the end of it. It is the only time the road has no traffic, it turns out. I followed him to the local mini mall where D left the giant truck in the parking lot and then I brought him back so we could crash for a few more hours. We spent the rest of the day returning the truck, setting up our living room so that it was livable, and finally retrieving our pets from our old home and introducing them to the new one. On Wednesday I would drive D to the airport so he could go back to work in Virginia. He wouldn't be back in our new home for months.
Apart from having to unpack everything myself, I enjoyed the months alone to putter about our new house and yard. It gave me time to put my mental house in order along with the physical one. Our search for the perfect house for us had been one fraught with hope and compromises, a great deal of stress and more than a few tears shed. It didn't help that our search for a home was tangled up in the process of trying to start a family.
While trying to buy a house we were heartbroken and thwarted in our attempts several times. The most painful attempt was a fairly large and broken down Victorian, that in spite of its ugliness and awkward placement had become my heart's desire. Unfortunately, it was not to be. While walking through the house I had been able to see with my mind's eye what our children would look like, I could practically hear them running around upstairs, I could see their shoes, knee pads, and back packs lined up on the back stairway. The tiny room off of the master bedroom would make the perfect nursery. I had to have this place, because to not have it would be to accept that that family I saw wasn't to be...I had to do what I could to make that house ours so our family could come into being.
But no amount of hoping, wishing, and begging the Universe was going to make it mine. The house was in much too need of repair, and our lender wouldn't agree to let us burden ourselves with a (possibly) collapsing money pit. It was our second set back, and it wasn't going to be our last. We sank into despair for awhile and gave up looking. On the family building front, we were also at a stand still. After two years of trying, we had gone to specialists to figure out what was holding us back, and issues seemed to be twofold. I had a large fibroid that had taken up residence, which may or may not be affecting matters, and D's sperm was total, complete, garbage. The crappy sperm was blamed for our infertility, and we were told, that without a doubt, moving onto IVF was our only option. But before we could do that, we had to go to meeting upon meeting...with doctors, psychologists, money and insurance people, shot training and genetic counseling, blood work, and visits to an Ob/Gyn for me and a Urologist for D. The Infertility Circus would set us back another year before we could get started.
During that time we found the house that would be our home. It had all the lovely historic touches we craved, including a beautiful working fireplace...and it was in perfect shape. It was situated on a quiet, dead end street, with a 1/4 acre back yard...wooded and private. As we walked through the house we could hear kids playing in the street. But, it was small. Quaint, cute, adorable, cozy, whatever our real estate agent wanted to call it, it was small. Two bedrooms one bath, dining room, living room, kitchen...that was it. Tried as I might I couldn't picture a family living here. The sellers had two young children and needed to move on. This was a place for empty nesters, newly weds, a twenty-something just starting out. Buying this place was admitting to ourselves that we couldn't see the whole family thing working out for us, not for a long time, at any rate. We walked around the back and pointed to where a new addition could maybe, possibly be added, "when the time came". But I could tell by my husband's face that we were kidding ourselves. We would live in this place until our old age, with the sounds of other people's kids all around us, entertaining our families in the dining room with it's lovely built-ins, enjoying a cocktail in front of a roaring, non child-friendly fire with cats on our laps. It was a fine house, it would be a fine life, it just wasn't the one I wanted.
I suppose, that by the title of this blog, anyone can tell that things worked out differently than I expected. After major surgery to remove the fibroid, 4 rounds of IVF, and one heartbreaking miscarriage, we had twin boys. We started having fires only after the boys went to sleep, and the laundry in the basement drove me crazy. Then we started to potty train, and the 1 bathroom all the way on the second floor pushed us to have a potty chair in the living room 24/7. Then, in what may appear to be total madness, we decided to try for a third child. Understand...we didn't think it would work. We certainly didn't think it would happen quickly. We would have all the time in the world to reasses our housing situation. But it did work, quickly, after one failed FET attempt and one fresh IVF cycle a couple of months later, we were pregnant. Nearly fertile, of us, I have to say.
Now we are crammed...stuffed...full to bursting in our little house. Thankfully, joyfully, sadly full.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Futility
Today I'm feeling the futility of everything I do. I don't feel sad...or blah...or angry...just bogged down. The only cure for feeling this way that I know of is to DO something, but I feel hopelessly stuck.
I cook the boys a healthy meal...but I know they won't eat most of it, and that the remainder will get tossed on the floor.
I put them both on the potty but I know that DA won't do anything, and will scream NO NO NO at the top of his lungs while doing it.
I put AK down for her nap, but I know that the bassinet is too small, and that what she really needs is a crib. But where will I put it?
I know that everything will work out eventually, but right now I am stuck. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I don't have the faintest idea on how to get from here to there.
I never used to feel this way while doing IVF and trying to get pregnant. I know that other people feel the hopelessness of it all...that they feel angry. Maybe even betrayed by their God. But I never did. I believed, no, I knew that I would be a parent one day. One way or another I would be. Sure, most of the time I didn't think that I would have a biological child, but I would have a child. I just had to work at it.
I didn't hate IVF. I felt like I was doing something. Sometimes I actually enjoyed it. Measuring out the meds, going to appointments, getting blood drawn. I was DOING something, going somewhere, taking action. I was moving on down the road. I didn't know all the twists and turns but I knew I was going somewhere. There was a beginning, a middle, and someday there would be an ending.
And now I have my ending. But the end was just the beginning, and now I spend a lot of days floating around. I liked my life having a goal, a project. Now I have lots of goals and tons of projects, but I can't see how to do them, or even start.
I need a bigger house, but how will we get one if we can't sell this one? And how will I sell it if I can't get the projects done that will make it sellable? How can I find time to do those projects when I can't even find time to shower? How I can I stand myself when there are so many others who would be begging to have these problems? To have three kids in a tiny house that they bought when they thought they would be lucky to even have ONE?
How do you toilet train twin three year old boys? Seriously..how do you? Because I haven't a clue, apparently.
How do I get there from here? And where is there?
I cook the boys a healthy meal...but I know they won't eat most of it, and that the remainder will get tossed on the floor.
I put them both on the potty but I know that DA won't do anything, and will scream NO NO NO at the top of his lungs while doing it.
I put AK down for her nap, but I know that the bassinet is too small, and that what she really needs is a crib. But where will I put it?
I know that everything will work out eventually, but right now I am stuck. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I don't have the faintest idea on how to get from here to there.
I never used to feel this way while doing IVF and trying to get pregnant. I know that other people feel the hopelessness of it all...that they feel angry. Maybe even betrayed by their God. But I never did. I believed, no, I knew that I would be a parent one day. One way or another I would be. Sure, most of the time I didn't think that I would have a biological child, but I would have a child. I just had to work at it.
I didn't hate IVF. I felt like I was doing something. Sometimes I actually enjoyed it. Measuring out the meds, going to appointments, getting blood drawn. I was DOING something, going somewhere, taking action. I was moving on down the road. I didn't know all the twists and turns but I knew I was going somewhere. There was a beginning, a middle, and someday there would be an ending.
And now I have my ending. But the end was just the beginning, and now I spend a lot of days floating around. I liked my life having a goal, a project. Now I have lots of goals and tons of projects, but I can't see how to do them, or even start.
I need a bigger house, but how will we get one if we can't sell this one? And how will I sell it if I can't get the projects done that will make it sellable? How can I find time to do those projects when I can't even find time to shower? How I can I stand myself when there are so many others who would be begging to have these problems? To have three kids in a tiny house that they bought when they thought they would be lucky to even have ONE?
How do you toilet train twin three year old boys? Seriously..how do you? Because I haven't a clue, apparently.
How do I get there from here? And where is there?
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Better Full Than Empty
So...This is my Blog. For a first post this is going to be kind of lame, because I have a shortage of time, and too many thoughts. My hands are full...my life is full. Sometimes too full.
I have twin boys that just turned 3 in November, and a 6 month old daughter. All of them are taking a nap upstairs, or supposed to be...but one of the boys is running about and making a fracas, his brother is sleeping, and their sister is due to wake up any minute to get fed.
This is my life now. There was many ways it could have gone. When passers by see me in our local Target with our boys, usually one of them screaming, the other one throwing things in the cart, and the baby calmly studying her toes they quite often comment "Boy...you sure have your hands full." Yes...yes I do. But it almost never happened. The effort, the money, the science, the time, the heartbreak, the patience and the luck...most of all, the luck, it took to get all three of them here is mind boggling.
Yes, my hands are full. My heart is full...my life is full. But, better full than empty.
I have twin boys that just turned 3 in November, and a 6 month old daughter. All of them are taking a nap upstairs, or supposed to be...but one of the boys is running about and making a fracas, his brother is sleeping, and their sister is due to wake up any minute to get fed.
This is my life now. There was many ways it could have gone. When passers by see me in our local Target with our boys, usually one of them screaming, the other one throwing things in the cart, and the baby calmly studying her toes they quite often comment "Boy...you sure have your hands full." Yes...yes I do. But it almost never happened. The effort, the money, the science, the time, the heartbreak, the patience and the luck...most of all, the luck, it took to get all three of them here is mind boggling.
Yes, my hands are full. My heart is full...my life is full. But, better full than empty.
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