At the age of 28, I was admitted to the antepartum unit at Mount Sinai Hospital, where I lay in Trendelenburg position day and night, flat on my back, my head 15 degrees below my feet. It was hoped that with the benefit of gravity, my twin girls could remain inside me, so that they might make it to 27 weeks. I had just seven more weeks to go.
In this discomforting position, I spent endless hours on my iPhone researching premature births. Yes, girls born prematurely fared better than boys. Yes, 26 to 27 weeks were much more viable than babies born at 24 to 25 weeks. Even at 24 weeks, they’d remain in the newborn ICU for several more months, a frightening and stressful time filled with ups and downs, but I could still emerge with two healthy girls who might have some developmental delays, muscular weaknesses and/or some learning disabilities, but certainly their lives would be worth living.
Still I prayed, though I had never been religious. I prayed that my babies would make it and that I would stay calm, because I knew anxiety would put me into labor. And anxiety had been my baseline for as long as I could remember. Now I had to focus on my babies, no matter the stress. Anxiety had no place here.
I’d battled stress and anxiety at every step of this pregnancy, having tried for years to conceive. Finally, my husband and I went to an infertility specialist and began the agonizing (and costly!) journey of IVF. After daily injections of hormones and finally intrauterine insemination, where my husband’s sperm were injected directly into my uterus, we were joyfully stunned to discover I’d become pregnant on the first round.
We were even more stunned by what came next.
“Um, I think that you should sit down,” my physician said, turning to my husband, Ben, while I was undergoing an ultrasound.
Ben sat down, as the doctor pointed to the screen.
“One, two, three, four, five … there are five heartbeats and five sacs.” He paused to let that information sink in. Then he said, “Get dressed and my nurse will help you to my office. We’ll discuss our options.”
He spoke matter-of-factly, but the quaver in his voice and the look on his face made it clear that he was also in shock.
Five heartbeats, though I knew, having been trained as a physician myself, that “heartbeats” is just a warm and fuzzy term medical professionals use to describe the sounds of fluttering cells of embryos too undeveloped to yet have hearts.
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