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 words were blunt and graphic. This dangerous and potentially fatal condition was after my babies.
“Okay,” I said pushing back a tear with my finger. “So what do we do?” I looked back at him for the answer. He got up from his stool and handed me a tissue.
“Mrs. Duffy, I suggest you follow up with your OB, but I would strongly recommend you stay on bed rest until the clot resolves.” He grabbed his notepad from the counter and scribbled down the names of vitamins—ones I had never heard of. “You should double the dose of your prenatal vitamins and folic acid since there are two in there.”
“Oh right, of course. That makes sense.” I nodded in agreement.
I turned and looked back at the now blank ultrasound screen, and I thought: There are two little babies in there, no bigger than a lentil, they have each other and are surrounded by amniotic fluid and a flipping blood clot.
“All right Mrs. Duffy, you are all set,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Remember to follow up with your doctor as soon as possible,” he said, and walked out the door.
Pregnant with twins AND bed rest. That was a lot to digest all at once. Then, add to that a dangerous blood clot in my uterus that could make me lose them. I felt a sense of fury at this clot that had interjected itself into my healthy pregnancy. My own body was turning on me and trying to take away my babies. Well, I refused to succumb to this worst-case-scenario. I decided that losing this pregnancy and these babies was not an option.
Ed couldn’t make it to the perinatologist appointment—he was taking a deposition. I wished he was sitting in the exam chair right beside me. Ed would know what to do. Ed would understand what was happening and what we needed to do to fix it. I had so many questions for Dr. Bill—the most important being: how are we going to save my babies? Nothing came out of my mouth except for anxious breathing.
After a few seconds, I calmed enough to ask Dr. Bill for clarification. I was hoping he might admit that he had made a mistake. He might take back his fateful words. He might say I was actually having a normal pregnancy and that my babies looked healthy. The room fell silent as I waited for his answer. I could hear Abby snacking on her Goldfish, but the iPad had been muted, and she stared at the screen silently. It seemed like this was happening to someone else in a parallel universe, not to me, like this was Back to the Future—Marty McFly‘s alternate version of 1985. Maybe if I walked outside there would be a DeLorean waiting to take me back to the real version of my life.
But it actually wasn’t the first time I’d heard the term “Twin to Twin Disease.” The possibility of this happening had been mentioned to me in the early doctor visits, but I’d discarded it because I had thought it would never apply to us. I thought it was just another example of the all-knowing and ever-hovering doctors laying out rare negative outcomes. I never imagined things would go wrong, this wrong. And then, in an instant, all the warnings I’d brushed aside came rushing back to me.
Dr. Cooper had told us when I was around twelve weeks pregnant that I was carrying Monochorionic-Diamniotic twins—Mono-Di.
“I see the membrane separating the two,” he said studying the ultrasound screen.
“Oh okay, and what does that mean?”
“That tells us that your twins are in their own amniotic sac but share the same placenta.”
The membrane is a big deal in twins. It‘s how they are able to distinguish the type of twins you are carrying. The sharing of the placenta—a monochorionic placenta—is a special characteristic of identical twins.
“Crystal, these types of twins can carry their own host of problems because they are at potential risk for twin to twin transfusion.”
I didn’t really understand what he meant by that, but I nodded because I wanted to move on and discuss other things I thought were more important and relevant. Just as with any pregnancy warning, I always thought: It‘s not going to be me, not my babies. No, that‘s the type of thing that only happens to 0.1 percent of people having twins, and they probably smoked and drank during their entire pregnancy. But I was wrong. Painfully wrong.
I sat there astounded as Dr. Bill unraveled more details of the horrific disease.
“Twin
