The Surprise of our Life

19 weeks pregnant (or so we thought at the time), Noel and I are sitting naively anxiously and excitedly in the waiting room at the radiology center to get our first ultrasound of this pregnancy and find out whether we’re having a girl or boy this time around! We joke around, saying it’s probably a girl, and how great it would be to just reuse all of Lilah’s things. I’m thinking about how different this pregnancy has been from the first. How wiped I’ve been (but caring for a 2 year old would do that to anybody), how sick I was in the first trimester (wasn’t out of the ordinary - every pregnancy is different), how quickly I popped out (very common when it’s not your first pregnancy), how I felt very full and heavy and my belly seemed to be growing exponentially by the week (blamed that on it being my second pregnancy, too), awful, terrible posterior pelvic and pubic symphysis pain from 12 weeks on (thought I was just carrying much lower this time around, after all, Lilah paved the way the first time). I’d joke around often that it felt like I weighed 500 pounds and was carrying 8 babies. I sure walked like I felt that way, too. But, I was just thankful to be pregnant again and tried not to complain too often. Every pregnancy is different, and I guessed I just got lucky with Lilah. I had never felt more healthy than when I was pregnant with her, and maybe this was payback for having one of ‘those’ glorious pregnancies that other pregnant women hate you for.

Our ultrasound technician called us in from the waiting room, and I noticed out of the corner of my eye that she was checking me out as I walked towards her. Her eyes double-take at a glimpse of my belly stretching out my sweater, the way I was walking, just for a split second, and I thought it was a little funny as she sees pregnant women all the time. Turns out, she had an inkling. But she didn’t say anything, I didn’t think twice about it, and we moved on. I lay down on the bed, and she squirts warm jelly on my tummy. She’s an especially cheery, warm and lovely person and I’m instantly glad that we got her for our first scan.

She puts the wand at the top of my uterus, swooshes down just once towards my pelvis, and flys back in her chair swearing out loud. My initial thought is not that something was horribly wrong. I thought that maybe I was 7-8 months along and that it would explain why I felt so pregnant! In the next second, Noel and I are asking what on earth she saw in there. She put her wand back on, saying, “there’s not just one in there you guys”. What?!? I’m speechless, and Noel thinks out loud, “twins??”. “No,” Jodi says, “there’s three. You’re having triplets”. I am suddenly hyper aware of everything in that room. I can tell her heart is beating fast, I can feel her shaking as she continues to swoosh that wand over and over just to make sure she didn’t count wrong. I can see that she’s trying to catch her breath as she repeats that we’re having triplets. Whaaaat is happeniiiing?! I cover my eyes as I scream and laugh and cry, trying to keep my self from leaping off the table and flying away in this out of body experience. I look at Noel, we’re both laughing and swearing, and shaking and in total shock and disbelief. Sure I joked around about twins, but never, ever, ever had the thought of triplets, ever, even for a split second had it ever crossed my mind.

So, we are pregnant with natural spontaneous triplets. They all have heart beats, are all moving around, already bugging each other. There is an identical twin pair, and a fraternal. I ovulated twice, and one of the eggs split (time to go and buy a lottery ticket). As if we weren’t already shocked enough, they are ALL BOYS!!

Side Note: Some things I’ve learned since we got pregnant this time around, and would have been good to know just for my own personal knowledge and mental preparation. ONE: Conceiving while breastfeeding is said to increase your chance of having multiples by 9 times. So instead of about a 1 in 90 chance, it becomes 1 in 9. I was nursing Lilah at the time we made these babies. TWO: My mom came out with the fact that she used to ovulate twice. I can’t say for sure whether I did or not, I’d never monitored my ovulation and was happy to get pregnant the old fashioned way. But there’s a good chance that I did, too. THREE: Turns out multiples run in the family, though it’s not well-known (I’d actually either completely forgotten this information, or it had never occurred to me that it meant we had a higher chance of conceiving multiples) and as far as we all know, there is only one living pair of twins, born about 3 years ago to my cousin. Armed with all of this information, I would have at least been even a little mentally prepped for the possibility of having more than one baby in my tummy at a time.

So, after this miraculous discovery, the tech had to leave the room to clear the rest of her appointments for the afternoon. They had planned for about 45 minutes for a singleton baby, but add two more and you end up at about 2 hours and 15 minutes to scan all three. They pushed my due date to April 16, 2013 (not that I’ll make it to 40 weeks with three!) as two of the babies were measuring at about 17 weeks 5 days, and the other about 6 days behind. The little one was setting off some red flags because of his size, though it’s not unusual for twins to be different sizes, so they investigated a little further. We were told that the smaller twin had a little less amniotic fluid around him than his twin brother, who had a little excess than what was considered normal. They didn’t go into much detail, but we were told that it’s possible that the twin pair are battling with twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, and that it’s a pretty serious thing. As if we hadn’t just been rocked by the idea of triplets, we had the possibility of this syndrome threatening the health and lives of our baby boys. I could tell that they were trying not to worry us, so I took that to heart and tried not to be worried. Within that appointment, they had us transferred from my amazing midwives over to an OB/GYN at the hospital, and had another ultrasound booked for us the following morning. These guys were crazy efficient.

That night we were trying to continue life as normal as we announced the news to our parents and some close friends. We figured the more support and prayer we had, the better! I was very good about not ‘googling’ about twin-twin transfusion syndrome, but I did do just a very quick read through so that I wouldn’t show up to the ultrasound the next morning totally unaware and unprepared for what they might be telling us. I explained it a little bit to Noel, and though it had us both upset, we were glad to know and very hopeful that all would be fine. We sure didn’t sleep well that night, but we tried, knowing that we had plenty of sleepless nights ahead of us.