Twin to Twin. Crystal Duffy
blackout curtains over the room‘s sole window. The doctor specialized in high-risk pregnancies, and the ultrasound he was about to give me could forever change the course of mine. Or, it could be just another routine scan and all would be the same as it was before.
My mom, dad, and two-year-old daughter, Abby, were in the exam room with me. They were seated on a black upholstered couch angled in such a way that they could view the large ultrasound screen on the opposite wall. My dad‘s sneakers tapped on the linoleum floor. Abby lay on her stomach, her elbows pressed up against my mom. She kicked her legs gently back and forth. She giggled as she held up the screen to her iPad while she watched Curious George.
There was a brisk knock on the door and a nurse, a petite brunette in her mid-twenties, entered. She asked me to lie back on the exam table. The paper crinkled loudly beneath me as I struggled to find a comfortable position—a nearly impossible task for a twenty-three week pregnant woman with twins. A few days before, the everyday discomfort of gestating two babies had taken a sharp, dangerous turn. I was suddenly in agony, an intense pain that I had not been able to fully articulate to Dr. Cooper, my OB. Painful spasms were shooting down my spinal cord, and I’d started to feel a continuous sensation of a hard, tightened abdomen. I was suddenly expanding rapidly—and it wasn’t just in my mind. I recalled the previous week‘s conversation with Dr. Cooper during a routine visit; as I stood on his scale, it showed me I’d gained eight pounds in a mere week. “Are you kidding me?” I said to him. “How is this possible?” I felt like Violet, the rude girl in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory who inflates hugely after she chews the forbidden Wonka gum—like I would burst at any moment.
The nurse wrapped the cuff around my arm and took my blood pressure, scribbled the numbers in my chart. “This might be a little cold,” she said as she pulled up my blouse. She grabbed a small white tube of ultrasound gel and began to rub it all over my belly. Her touch was soothing. It reminded me how I missed having massages at the spa. After I have the babies, I’ll have to book myself an appointment, I thought.
My massage was interrupted by a knock on the door. I sat up instinctively, dripping some of the gel onto the top of my shorts. “All right, Crystal,” said the perinatologist, as he walked into the exam room. A soft-spoken man with warm brown eyes, salt and pepper hair, and a red polka dot bow tie under his starched white lab coat; he bore a strong resemblance to Bill Nye the Science Guy. “Let‘s have a look at these babies,” he said.
I nodded my head fiercely and leaned slowly back on the examining table. “Okay,” I croaked as I adjusted my shorts. My heart was pounding so fast I wondered if anyone could hear it. No doubt my babies could as they were kicking up a storm, probably telling me to chill out.
Dr. Bill Nye sat down on his medical stool, grabbed the wand and began sliding it across my belly. He scanned silently for a few seconds. Then he leaned in close to the monitor and glided the wand back to the other side. He bit his bottom lip, steadied his shoulders and looked directly at me. Then, without preface, conveyed the devastating information.
“Mrs. Duffy, as I suspected, you have Twin to Twin disease. There is a lot of fluid here. There is also a clear size difference—it appears that one of the babies has stopped growing.” He scanned the instrument around my belly more fiercely, his eyes never leaving the screen.
I stared at the screen. I saw two little teddy grahams floating around the excess amniotic fluid. My heart thudded painfully, and my face felt hot. I closed my eyes to prevent the salty, fresh tears from streaming. I didn’t know what the heck all of his words meant. My brain was on overload. The only information I could really process was the fact that one baby had stopped growing, and they were both in grave danger.
The pregnancy had started in a normal enough way. My husband Ed and I were both ecstatic that our family would be growing. The day after we found out we were having girls, we painted the spare bedroom a pale pink and purchased two matching cribs. Two years prior, we had been blessed as parents for the first time, and I’d been given the greatest title of all: mother to our daughter Abigail. But, though the positive pregnancy test made me feel like I was on cloud nine, my anticipatory excitement and happiness was tinged with fear. We’d suffered the traumatic and abrupt end to two previous pregnancies we thought had been healthy—one before Abigail and one after—and they had left us heartbroken. With our joy came unanswerable questions: What if something goes wrong? What if this pregnancy results in another miscarriage? What if the problem is me?
When I hit the seven weeks pregnant mark a couple of weeks later, the fear had finally started to dissipate. And then, abruptly, I started bleeding heavily, soaking through my clothes and onto the furniture. It was déjà vu; I’d done this all before. I thought I was having yet another miscarriage. Ed drove me to the ER and we waited what felt like hours to see a resident who of course couldn’t tell us anything—until the Obstetrics attending arrived. When he arrived, he called for an emergency ultrasound. Since I was still so early in the pregnancy, I was subjected to the early ultrasound torture—the kind where the ultrasound wand—a long and narrow device—is inserted deep inside you. I laid back and placed my feet in the stirrups, and closed my eyes, dreading the words that were about to come out of this doctor‘s mouth. Our baby is gone, I thought to myself. Raising his eyebrows, the doctor turned to me.
“Wait a second, was this a spontaneous pregnancy?”
“Excuse me?” I wrinkled my forehead in confusion. What the heck was a spontaneous pregnancy? Was that like the Immaculate Conception?
“Err sorry, I mean, did you use fertility drugs?” he clarified.
“No. Why? We conceived our first child naturally—and fairly quickly might I add—we didn’t need to.”
“I see two heartbeats,” he said and pointed to the screen. “Look, there‘s one flicker and there‘s the other.” He turned from Ed, who stood silent and shocked, to me. “Right here is one amniotic sac, and up here, there‘s the other.”
“Holy shit,” Ed said as his expression changed to a smug smile. No doubt proud of what his super sperm had accomplished.
“Are you serious? Are you trying to tell me I have two babies in there?” I asked stupidly. Confusion and disbelief washed over me.
“Yes! You are having twins. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Duffy!” he said as if he was awarding me a million bucks.
What I said next must have made me look and sound like a complete idiot.
“How is that possible?” Clearly my egg split somewhere along the way (or were there two eggs?). I tried to remember from biology class back in high school. Trying to recover from my stupidity, I quickly asked, “Are they identical or fraternal?”
“Too early for us to tell,” he said continuing to study the ultrasound screen.
My feeling of shock was soon overcome by joy and excitement. Ed and I would be welcoming two little additions to our family.
“Ed, our prayers have been answered, God has given us two babies.”
“I do see something else,” he interrupted pausing to stare intently at the screen. Oh gosh, I thought. Is there another baby in there?
“There‘s your uterus, and the lining,” he said mapping out my reproductive organs on the screen. “There‘s a blood clot in the uterus. That‘s the source of your bleeding and cramping.” And there we had it.
“What does that mean, exactly?” I sat up on the table like a springboard, lowering my feet from the stirrups and pulling down the bottom of my gown. He sat down on his stool and scooted closer.
“We need to be very cautious,” he said. “Sometimes these clots can pull the pregnancy and terminate it. In other cases, the clots will reabsorb themselves into your body and your pregnancy will continue as normal.”
My brain was trying to catch up to my heart. I felt my joy swirl into fear. “Pull the pregnancy” and “terminate it.” His