“The reefs around Black Rock are incredible,” Ed replied.
“How far of a swim is it?” I started to ask, but then a sudden, sharp pain in my abdomen stopped my words.
“Ouch!” I screamed.
Ed instinctively dropped the snorkel gear on the beach and put his arm behind my back. “Babe, what‘s wrong?”
“Ow!” I yelled again.
“Crystal, what‘s wrong!?” Ed said again.
“Really painful stomach cramps.” I hunched over trying to breathe. “Just give me a sec,” I said, trying to inhale and exhale deeply.
“Here, let’s get you up to the room fast,” Ed said as he scooped me up into his arms.
The scene back at our hotel room was a chaotic mess. I was hunched over on the couch screaming in pain. Ed sat beside me, frantically googling things on his laptop. He was repeating the words, “It‘s okay, don’t worry, everything is going to be fine.”
“I hope so,” I choked out the words.
Heavy cramps were pounding inside me like an earthquake, burning like an inferno. I curled up in a ball on the foldout couch to ease the pain. I began to feel incredibly sick to my stomach. Could this be morning sickness? I thought to myself.
Then I felt it.
Blood started to trickle down slowly between my legs. I thought that was normal. Everyone said I might have some implantation bleeding. But it kept flowing and flowing. After several minutes, I knew something was definitely not right. I had already soaked through my board shorts and onto the palm tree printed pillow I’d been sitting in front of. I jumped up and dashed to the bathroom. I locked the door, still trying to convince myself everything was fine, and sat down, my toes curled up against the cold hard tile floor. With one hand on my stomach and the other gripping onto the wall, I let go and it all came flushing out. And then I looked down into the toilet bowl. I will never be able to get the horrifying image I saw there out of my head. I screamed in panic. I kept screaming until my throat was raw. Ed, who had been pounding on the door, demanding I let him in, finally kicked it open. He looked down and saw what I saw and gasped.
He reached for me and I collapsed into his arms.
When I opened my eyes, it was still dark outside; mist covered our bedroom windows. I sat up in the bed breathing deeply as I thought about the haunting memory of the painful nightmare I had already lived once. Each time the dream was a bit different; sometimes we would be snorkeling when it happened, other times we would be in the middle of a candlelight dinner on the beach. Each story ended in the same way. I lost our first baby in Hawaii that first summer after we were married, and then two years later, lost our second baby on a trip to Las Vegas. The memory of losing our two babies still haunted me and the fear was now projecting itself onto our twin pregnancy.
How I wished the Twin to Twin diagnosis had been just a nightmare. Nightmares ended when you woke up, and everything returned to normal. I turned to look at Ed, who had fallen asleep with a laptop on our comforter. He’d been awake most of the night researching TTTS, carrying the panic and fear for both of us.
I nudged his arm gently.
“Did that really happen?” I softly whisper. “Wait. Before you answer, just tell me it didn’t. Tell me I dreamt it.”
He sighed. He couldn’t tell me what I so badly wanted to hear.
“Are we actually going to talk to a specialist today about some bizarre blood transfusion disease?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so,” he replied groggily.
“I’m scared,” I confessed.
“Me too,” he said as he hugged me tightly. He held me in bed for a long time. As we got dressed, he went over some of his findings of TTTS with me, the parts he left out were too terrifying for me to even imagine. I had decided that, in a desperate attempt to avoid complete distress, I was going to stay off the internet. I did not want to terrorize myself with unknowns or potential scenarios of TTTS. In order to survive this, to beat this, the babies—our girls—needed to be calm and soothed, which meant I needed to be that way as well. If I was a nervous wreck, they would feel that and feed off of it. It was far easier to hear what I needed to know about this disease from Ed. It was hard to keep all the details straight, but I wanted to walk into the Maternal-Fetal Medicine (MFM) office and feel a little familiar with some of the terms they would use.
Ed explained to me what Dr. Bill had tried to the day before—that because our girls were identical and shared a placenta, they had many abnormal blood vessels that connected their umbilical cords and circulatory systems. Depending on a number of factors—blood type and direction of the flow—blood could be transfused disproportionately from one twin (known as the donor) to the other twin (known as the recipient). The transfusion caused the donor twin to have decreased blood volume, and in turn, a slower growth than the co-twin. If the donor twin had poor urinary output, that could cause low amniotic fluid—another big potential problem. The recipient baby, on the other hand, could become overloaded with blood. This superfluous amount of blood would strain this baby‘s heart to the point that it might actually develop heart failure. I took a deep breath. I knew we had a long day ahead of us.
Chapter 3
The Longest Day
Even though the perinatologist‘s office was in the same building as Dr. Cooper‘s office, it felt somehow like we were in another world completely. A world where pregnancies had gone awry. We had been sent to the Texas Fetal Center, which was across the sky bridge close to the children‘s hospital. The center specialized in fetal care for babies with congenital anomalies or genetic abnormalities. During my pregnancy with Abby, I had read all about these centers and all the details of genetic testing for abnormalities and fetal interventions. I knew how lucky we had been both then and now. I had always felt blessed that my pregnancy with her had been uneventful.
We were meeting with an MFM Specialist, who was an expert in diagnosing and treating high-risk pregnancy complications including TTTS. Ed held my hand as we walked into the office; my nerves were completely shot. I was freezing, but my palms were oddly sweaty. I felt nauseated, and a lump started to form in the back of my throat. Breathe, I just needed to focus on breathing. I squeezed Ed‘s hand so tight that his wedding ring dug into my finger. The reception area looked more like the inside of a home—a parlor sofa against the wall and an arm chair to the side. There was a frosted glass window; Ed tapped on the glass. The window slid open and we were greeted by a petite, blonde nurse. She was young, about twenty-three or twenty-four. She wore thick, black-rimmed glasses, had her hair pulled back in a ponytail and wore light blue scrubs with little black and white Snoopys all over. Charles Schultz‘s Snoopy reminded me of Abby. When she was a newborn, during middle of the night feedings, I always had the TV on to help me stay awake. I often watched old reruns of Peanuts since it was the only thing on. One of Abby‘s first stuffed animals had been a tiny Snoopy that sang the theme song when you pressed its stomach. She took that Snoopy everywhere with her. My warm memories of Abby deflected my nerves and calmed me.
“Hi Mr. and Mrs. Duffy, she said. “we have been expecting you. I’m Jessica, the nurse coordinator—we spoke last night on the phone.” She reminded me as if there was any chance I had forgotten. I nodded
