Finding out we're having (high risk) twins! Pt. 2

When we left the midwife’s office that day we had a roughly 24 hour wait before we saw the sonologist. We did a little bit of googling because we left without much knowledge or understanding about what this diagnosis might mean. I tried to keep the googling to a minimum because I know that can lead to some deep, dark places but what I found, or maybe just what I chose to hold on to, was that MoMo twins have somewhere between and 80-95% chance of a good outcome. With all the scares and fear we’ve dealt with regarding our fertility journey, I gladly accepted an 80-95% chance of a good outcome. So for the rest of that day, we celebrated the brand new knowledge of our two babies, wondering which of them had been hiding during the first two ultrasounds and eagerly awaited the chance to see them again the very next day!

The hours ticked by slowly until it was finally time to visit the sonologist. He was a very old man who literally needed help to operate the ultrasound machine and do the exam and I struggled between wanting to trust what I could only assume were many, many decades of experience reading ultrasound scans and doubting that he was capable of accurately diagnosing what we were dealing with due to possible senility. This is probably a very ageist thing of me to say so I’ll go ahead and apologize for that but it was honestly how I felt! He didn’t leave me feeling super confident. But after our scan which left us on cloud 9 just for seeing our two wildly wiggling little babies, he said he believed he saw a membrane between the babies (making them Mono/Di twins, meaning they share a placenta but not an amniotic sac, a much less risky diagnosis) but couldn’t say with 100% certainty because the babies were still very small. We scheduled a follow up visit for 2 weeks later and despite the uncertainty, I spent the next 2 weeks operating under the assumption that I was carrying Mono/Di twins.   

The babies' second portraits

I want to take a little pause from the story telling to talk about how incredible those two ultrasounds were. Our first two, while nice and most importantly reassuring, were not very exciting. We saw a heart fluttering but other than that, all we could see was a little gray blob. The little bean was too small to have definitive body parts or distinguishable movement really. But the two ultrasounds at 12 weeks were some of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen in my whole life. Seeing little hands waving at us, little legs kicking, twitching, shifting, rolling, there has never been a more beautiful sight. I remember saying that they seemed like they were playing together and marveling at how wonderful is that my children will never be alone. They will know the presence and love and companionship of their sibling from the very first day of their existence. Those thoughts and experiences alone have been hands down the most joyous moments of my life so far. And to think! 12 week old embryos were making me feel that way. I can only imagine how they’re going to make me feel as newborns, infants, toddlers, children, teenagers, young adults!

Next on the timeline of events was the phone call from the Maternal Fetal Medicine (or MFM) office that our midwives had referred us to. It was a long wait so by the time they finally called to schedule me, I was so relieved to be moving forward! The call came on July 6th I believe but they didn’t want to see me for another 4 weeks. I promptly melted into a puddle of tears when they told me that. How could I have just been told that I may have a moderate to high risk pregnancy but almost 6 weeks are going to elapse between my doctor’s visits? After a lot of tears, the scheduler offered me an appointment 3 weeks away which seemed like the best offer so I accepted but I certainly did not feel very good about it. There were a lot of tears that followed. I felt like they didn’t care and weren’t willing to bend the protocol to help a very distressed woman. We wrote a letter with all our questions and concerns to submit to the doctor through the patient portal (which we never did) but it was a therapeutic process. And ultimately we expressed our concerns to my aunt who is a physician and who is good friends with a Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist in another practice at a different hospital than the ones my midwives referred us to. She reached out to him on our behalf and within a matter of days we had an appointment with him the following week. I was still longer than I felt I could possibly wait but it was about 10 days sooner than the other practice had offered to see us!

It was a long wait before that appointment arrived but I was still feeling pretty awful at that time so we kept to a nice schedule of roughly one outing or activity per day sandwiched between a lot of sitting on the couch and taking naps. We also started the processing of looking for a new house during this agonizing wait which occupied most of our mental energy so we didn’t have a lot of time left over to worry about the babies which was a blessing. A stressful, but necessary and timely blessing. Of course we continued to worry about the babies (I think we’ll be doing that for the rest of our lives!) but house hunting was a happy distraction. And before we knew it, our first appointment with a MFM was upon us.

To be continued..