Liz
Mom to Lola
April 26, 2014 – April 29, 2014
Santa Cruz, California
“There’s two in there!”
The midwife’s words, spoken at my first trimester ultrasound in October 2013, came as a delightful surprise. Never in the world did I imagine I would give birth to twins! My husband Kenny and I were very excited. We had suffered a miscarriage just a few months earlier, so we took this news as a happy, karmic reward. Twins don’t run in either of our families, but as I soon found out, identical twins (which is what we were having), aren’t tied to genetics at all. They happen randomly–when the egg splits in two after being fertilized–and occur in about 1 in 300 to 400 pregnancies.
Twin pregnancies, and especially identical twin pregnancies in which just one placenta nourishes both babies, are considered high-risk. While I was fearful about having this label attached to me, I felt more at ease as my pregnancy progressed. Everything seemed to be going okay. I was being seen approximately every two weeks, by either my delivering OB, or by the consulting specialists affiliated with Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital—one of the best hospitals in the nation. (Although Lucile Packard is located in Palo Alto, an hour’s drive away from my home in Santa Cruz, they fortunately have a satellite office/diagnostic center here in Santa Cruz, so I didn’t have to drive too far for my appointments.) And, starting at about 30 weeks, I had twice-weekly non-stress tests at the hospital in town where I would be delivering (Dominican Hospital). I was scheduled to be induced at 37 weeks gestation–on May 1st, 2014. I wanted to at least try for a natural birth, even though I knew that many sets of twins are delivered via C-section. [Read more…]