On Being Pregnant. With Twins.

by Katie

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I am pregnant.  With twins.  (Insert all sorts of scared, tired, nervous, and excited emojis here.)

 

 

These are babies number 3 and 4. (Insert all sorts of scared, tired, nervous, and excited emojis here).

As I sit here writing this post, I can feel their tiny kicks and punches, and my heart swells with love.  I am so blessed to be carrying two tiny children of God.  But my mind also swells with anxiety from all that can go wrong from here to their birth and from their birth forever onwards!  Motherhood is a contradiction of emotions!

Carrying twins means you have twice the pregnancy hormone going through you.  I was lucky and had half the morning sickness as with my previous 2 pregnancies.  But I have had more than double the exhaustion.  I have never been so tired in my life!  Maybe chasing a 2 year old and a 3 year old has something to do with it 🙂

 

So far we know that baby B is a girl.  Her name is Beatrix.   Her name means Blessing and she is named for author Beatrix Potter, who is known for Peter Rabbit, but has written a whole host of children’s stories featuring animals.  Baby A refused to let us know his/her sex so s/he remains nameless.

Because twin pregnancies are automatically considered high risk, being pregnant with twins is difficult for me.  High risk means there are more than double the OB appointments and more than 5 x the ultrasounds as a low risk pregnancy.

The reason this is difficult for me is because I have a fear of the medical world.  Despite my birthing stories, I really and truely believe the more natural the better.  With my first pregnancy I dreamt of a home birth.  (Actually I dreamt of a hut in the woods that my carpenter husband would build, where I would labour with nature.  But he said “No.  On no uncertain terms, No.”)

Instead of my {literally} natural birth, I had an emergency c-section.  In an operating room.  Where the only nature was…nothing.  It was sterile and white and artificial and bright.   I had a really hard time coming to grips with my birth story.  I may write more about some time.

I was determined to have a VBAC with my second, even though I knew it would be in a hospital.  I tried everything to go into labour.  You name it, I tried it. I ended up with planned section because I wasn’t going into labour, and labour was not in sight at all, and my OB didn’t want me to go too far overdue.  It turned out to be a God-send, because my uterine scar was nearly non-existent.  (As in, after stitching me up, my OB said if I had had one contraction, I would have bled out.  Not the words I was hoping to hear, especially when followed by, “and she can never try to go into labour again.”)

Back to twins.  So I have lots of appointments which cause me lots of anxiety.  I am dreading the next 4 months.   As in, it keeps me up and night and I have shed a not-small amount of tears over this.   Its weird, I know.  I sit in waiting rooms nearly hyperventilating.   I’m shaking when my name is called.   I burst into tears when the nurse says, “how are you today?”

Adulting – I have got this down. (Not even a little bit.)

If all goes well, I will have OB appointments and ultrasounds every 2 weeks until 30 weeks and then every week thereafter.    If I am counting correctly that’s more than 15 appointments!! AHH!  I am scaring myself!

And battling these emotions is the very real thankfulness that I live in a country that has such a wonderful healthcare system that costs me nothing (other than high taxes).

I am 21 weeks.  I have about 15 weeks left, and, if I calculated correctly, 15 appointments filled with dread/hate/fear/anxiety.

Pray for me and my first-world problem of too much medical care.