Introducing our three boys!

William (Baby C- Singleton)

Jackson (Baby B-Twin)

Heston (Baby A- Twin)

We were able to see the gender of each baby on our 14 week ultrasound, but the tech told us not to paint the nursery quite yet. We confirmed at 16 weeks, and again at 17.  We are definitely having boys! We are so, so excited!

16 Weeks and Counting

I am almost 16 weeks pregnant with triplets. I am measuring as big as a woman who is 6-7 months pregnant. My belly “popped” as they say at 10 weeks. At least I look pregnant :)

I feel pregnant every day. My doctor and all the books assure me that women with multiples experience pregnancy differently. By that he means worse. Triple the hormones. Triple the pain. Triple the size. Triple the vomiting, heart burn, and food aversions. 

Triple the misery and triple the joy. 

I wish I had a little more joy in between bouts of throwing up. I have had real trouble gaining weight because I throw up so much and food in general is still overshadowed by the nausea. I may have sounded a bit like the exorcist when my husband tried to put garlic in our fridge. I used to loooove garlic. Now the mere thought of it tainting my food is enough to make me threaten the man I love with a sharp object.

The acid reflux is pretty awful, too. One night I thought I had a muscle cramp in my back between my shoulder blades. Weirdly, it felt as if it were traveling through my chest into my sternum. It felt (I imagine) like a heart attack. I had my husband massage my back and I sobbed and sobbed until it finally subsided. 

As a side note, it is in these moments that my husband feels truly powerless to help. He wants so badly to make me feel better, but so often can only hold me as I cry. As you can probably tell, I have also gained the emotional side-effects of pregnancy. 

When I asked my nurse about the supposed back pain, she said it was acid reflux and the pain was from the acid burning a hole in the back of my esophagus next to my spine. She said that they see it all the time in the ER. People come in thinking they are having a heart attack and thousands of dollars later they are given Malox and some lidocaine. 

I guess I’m lucky I chose crying over the ER. 

I am also tired a lot. Or, I get tired a lot. Depends on the day. Shopping at Costco is often enough to tank me for the rest of the afternoon. As we left the store yesterday, I may have quoted a movie as I ambled toward the door.

“What, are we moving at warp speed?!”

I don’t walk as quickly as I used to. Those round ligaments protest. And if you find yourself laughing because you are picturing the bulk that I will become, you are not alone. My doctor, the nurses, and my husband all look at me with pity in their eyes. The pity says: you haven’t seen anything yet.

Positives:

·         People have been so supportive and helpful and excited for us.

·         My hair and nails are doing the good things that pregnancy has them do.

·         I get to tell funny jokes to the ultrasound technician about what we are going to name our three kids.

·         We see the babies all the time and that helps my anxiety a lot.

·         My skin is fine so far. I fully expect my belly to look like a bear hibernated in it for the winter and then mauled it, but right now it is great.

·         We have an army of friends ready to lend aid.

·         We are remodeling the kitchen (countertops and backsplash), we cleared out the spare bedroom, and organized the office. Nesting anyone?

·         We have names picked out.

·         We know the gender of the babies (finally!!) and can work on the nursery.

·         I have the best husband in the world who has been the most supportive person for whom I could have asked. I hope that I can get these three babies through all of this so that he can be an amazing father as well. When he kisses the belly three times, it makes it all worth it.

A window inside

With each ultrasound we watch the triplets get bigger. At first they were shapeless lima beans. At the next appointment they looked far more reptilian. Then suddenly they were gummy bears that wiggled there little nubbins. And the next time they looked like little people. All this before 12 weeks.

What a joy it is to watch you grow.

We watch these scans with intensity. Do they have skulls? Yes. Do they have two hemispheres to their brains. Yes. Do they have arms, legs, bladders, hearts, stomachs? Yes, all yes. We measure their heart rate, their growth, their NT space, their amniotic fluid.

Baby C as he is known (I will use “he” as opposed to that ubiquitous and creepy pronoun “it”) is the fraternal twin. He has his own placenta and is in the penthouse as we call it. He is highest in the uterus and is the most active on the scans. He is also the biggest. I would assume that is a side-effect of not being mashed by the other two.

Babies A and B are the identical twins. They are mono-di twins. (They share the same placenta, but have their own cords and amniotic sacs.) Baby A was so dubbed because (again “he”) was lowest in the uterus and closest the cervix. The twins swap places now and alternate positions. They stand on their heads and sit on each other. It is entertaining to watch, but gives our ultrasound techs a challenge each time. The twins are better off in their own sacs so that they do not entangle one another in their cords. But sharing the same placenta puts them at about a 20% risk for Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome, or TTTS. 

Each ultrasound is to measure growth and progress and to look for milestones. We breathed a collective sigh of relief when we could see skulls, limbs, organs, and a properly thin NT space. (This is a measurement of their risk for heart defects and chromosomal anomalies.) 

With every appointment we would be reassured that things were proceeding as well as to be expected in a triplet pregnancy. But still I continued to spot. Some days it was bright red blood. No matter how often they tell me that this can be perfectly normal and mean nothing bad, it terrifies me. And I continued to feel pain in my lower abdomen and pelvic region. 

They have since explained the joys of round ligament pain. It feels like cramps and imminent doom. When you get up from bed, it feels like something is tearing in half. I was convinced that it meant something was terribly wrong. No one told me that it is normal, to be expected, and will be even worse with triplets. Well, that’s comforting. 

The spotting is what made me really nervous. Particularly when one of my ultrasounds revealed that at 12 weeks I had complete placenta previa. I know better, but I started to read up on it at home.

“Placenta previa occurs when a baby's placenta partially or totally covers the mother's cervix — the doorway between the uterus and the vagina. Placenta previa can cause severe bleeding before or during delivery.
The placenta provides oxygen and nutrients to your growing baby and removes waste products from your baby's blood. It attaches to the wall of your uterus, and your baby's umbilical cord arises from it. In most pregnancies, the placenta attaches at the top or side of the uterus. In placenta previa, the placenta attaches to the lower area of the uterus. 

If you have placenta previa, you'll probably be restricted to bed rest for a portion of your pregnancy and you'll likely require a caesarean section (C-section) to safely deliver your baby.”

It was even worse when I got to this:

“If you have placenta previa, your health care provider will monitor you and your baby carefully to reduce the risk of these serious complications:

• Bleeding. One of the biggest concerns with placenta previa is the risk of severe vaginal bleeding (hemorrhage) during labor, delivery or the first few hours after delivery. The bleeding can be heavy enough to be life-threatening.
• Preterm birth. Severe bleeding may prompt an emergency C-section before your baby is full term.”

The good news is that most previa diagnosed in the first trimester resolves itself as the uterus expands and grows. Still, visions of bleeding to death continued to haunt me for several weeks. 

At this point, it is marginal previa and is definitely shifting away from my cervix as my uterus grows and expands. The spotting has even lessened. 

One more obstacle down. Praise the Lord. How many more to go?

A new perspective

One of the many challenges that people face in life is the difference between expectations and reality. When we are confronted with new information or situations that force us to adjust, reevaluate, or abandon our plans, this can be very painful. Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe it is just that this has happened a lot in the last two years. 

We want a baby. We can’t have one. 

We want to build our family through adoption. We can’t afford that. 

Embryo Adoption looks like a good option. We follow the process and get pregnant- exactly what we wanted! With triplets. Not what we wanted and certainly not what we expected.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me. We are so grateful and we love these growing babies. But, we did not give in to the moment of temporary insanity that gripped me days before our transfer. I wanted to transfer three embryos. I wanted to make sure that we had the highest possible chance of getting a baby. Thankfully my wise husband said no, that the reality of triplets is not something that we wanted and so we should not risk it. And here is the irony, of course. The less than one percent chance of getting triplets when we transferred two embryos did not even factor in to our decision. It could not happen to us. 

Oh, but someone is in that one percent. Never forget that. Those numbers that I clung to so much all through our journey really did matter. Statistics are made of people. 

Lesson learned.

Back to my point. We did not intentionally seek out triplets. We got them as the biggest surprise of our lives. And it is oh-so-complicated. 

We just wanted a baby. What we got was a high-risk pregnancy full of more potential for complications and problems than we could have possibly imagined at that time. This has required yet another huge re-alignment in our thinking and our expectations for the future. And this one is so painful because the overwhelming terror that I feel is mixed in with joy and hope. We could have three beautiful babies. But we have a long, long way to go. It is one day at a time, for sure. 

It is this painful transition between our expectations and our current reality, between our greatest hopes and our worst fears.

And no one can tell me that it will be okay.

Things get a little more complicated

We have live babies. 

There was such joy in this fact that it was almost too much of a shock to process that there is a plural noun at the end of that sentence. 

Speaking of shock, my husband’s face was priceless. And my mother-in-law’s. And the stunned silence and the (more-often-than-not) swearing on the other end of the phone as we shared the news with family. I can picture the big eyes and the round O of the mouth as it hangs open. Classic.

“You’re joking.”

Nope. Not even a little.  We are unequivocally having triplets. Five ultrasounds have already been done since we found out.

Yes, five.

From the moment that Dr. Slater’s office confirmed triplets, my care was transferred to Maternal Fetal Medicine in Boise. There isn’t a doctor in Twin who would even be willing to see me. We needed a specialist I was told. A high-risk doctor. We would be monitored very closely from that moment on.

“A Maternal Fetal Medicine (MFM) specialist is an obstetrician/gynecologist who deals with high-risk pregnancies or special problem pregnancies. MFM specialists have completed additional formal training and have advanced knowledge of the medical, genetic, surgical, and obstetrical complications that can occur during pregnancy.”

It was explained to us that I would need to go to Boise every two weeks for an OB appointment and ultrasound to monitor the growth and progress of the triplets. My first visit with the MFM office and my new doctor, Dr. Seyb, lasted three hours. They were and continue to be very thorough. Dr. Seyb is patient and kind, but refuses to be a fortune teller and speculate about possible dire outcomes. 

They keep telling me that it is still early in my pregnancy. This is so hard to hear when we have been doing all of this since April. 

Some days it is hard. But, to quote a friend, "What a beautiful problem to have."