As I sit in the waiting room as Henry has his surgery, I thought I would start to write about the difficulties we had with Aly's pregnancy. The first big drama happened in week 12. Aly woke up at about 4am and had been bleeding. With a drink in my hand, I can make this story last quite a while but here I will keep it to the quicker version for here. The blood clots that were dropping from Aly were like nothing I had seen before. They were like organs - like a piece of liver (at this point, in the long version, I say it was offal and everyone laughs and laughs and says "oh David you are so funny and great and handsome"). Although I didn't (and don't) know what a miscarriage looks like, I was certain that this was what was happening. I think that the doctor we saw thought so too because there was a tone of surprise in her voice when she saw both babies and heard two heartbeats on the ultrasound. It was eventually explained that Aly had a total placenta previa and, although they were changing her doctor over to a high risk doctor, there was not much that can be done. As a precaution, Aly went on bed rest part 1 and, on the plus side, we got lots of ultrasounds.
There were a few more bleeding scares but, eventually, the placenta moved and, for a few weeks, Aly had a "normal" pregnancy. Belly was growing, maternity clothes were bought. We even painted the babies' room. Although the bleeding had been very scary, we both were staying positive because we were assured that it didn't necessarily mean anything bad would happen.
20 weeks came and we went to the anatomy scan. It was cool to see the high definition images of the babies and the ultrasound tech was a cheery man that we constantly needed to remind that we were choosing to not know the gender of the babies. Everything was great, baby measurements were what they wanted to see. Nothing to worry about. The final part of the scan is where Aly's cervix is measured. Aly knew about this part and had had it measured a few times before. She whispered to me that we needed this measurement to be long. It wasn't. 1.5cm meant a shortened cervix (also referred to as incompetent cervix) and bed rest part 2 was to begin. We were really upset but we were optimistic - many women make it to full term with this issue, we are told.
21 weeks and we are back for a checkup. 1.4cm. Not much, if any, change. OK. Maybe we can do this. Nice bed resting, Aly.
22 weeks. Aly had a feeling that something had changed and that something was really wrong. She was right. Measurement was maybe 4mm (that's 0.4cm for those not so used to metric). This is devastating news. We are told, as I remember it, that the babies could come at any time and that it could happen really fast. I can't remember exactly what was said but there was definitely some mention of a toilet because what I do remember is Aly sobbing that she can't have her babies in the toilet. Aly wanted to go to hospital. As she put it, if she was going to have to give birth to these babies and it was too early to do anything to save them, then she couldn't risk it being at home. I agreed. Thus began bed rest 3, hospital bed rest.
For those of you that don't know, 24 weeks is a big deal in pregnancy. In the US, it is a legal line in the sand too. The term "viable" is horrible but that's what is used. We were two weeks away from viability.
I can't honestly remember if we had any optimism left at this point. I think we did. We were in a hospital in The Woodlands, which is where Aly's parents live, where she grew up and where we originally intended to have the babies. The hospital had a NICU but didn't take anything younger than 28 weeks gestational. We talked about transferring but the issue was that Aly wasn't in labor so the hospitals with those NICUs wouldn't take her. I think I had hope that we could make it to 28 Weeks and they could be taken care of up there. Aly thinks that, even at this stage, we still had hope of making full term.
That was part 1. Aly was in hospital 22 weeks into her pregnancy and, basically, if the babies came in the next two weeks, it would be considered a miscarriage. So, with that being the worst case and full term being almost impossible, we started getting our heads around premature birth and what that would mean for us.
(D)
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