The History (as I remember)

by Grant

    As time passes memories fade. I've been meaning to write a blog entry about the beginning of our experience with the girls. A long long time ago, in a womb far far away we found out that Rebekah was pregnant. Now, at the time it was pretty darn obvious since her tummy was sticking so far out. We took a road trip out to Michigan where Rebekah had to endure multiple comments of "You're not due until when?!" So, it was with some relief (in a small way) that when she went to the Dr. that she found out she was pregnant with twins. Of course, any relief about her size was quickly overwhelmed with feelings of panic. But while she was there they also discovered that there was no membrane between the babies. This meant that they were at a high risk for cord entanglement and as one Dr. called it, "spontaneous terminations" Talk about a term that makes you sick to your stomach. The doc also told us that there was a 50% chance that we would lose at least one of the babies. With that, they booted Rebekah out the door (after setting up an appt. w/ a specialist in Boise). Needless to say, we were semi-paralyzed with trepidation. The next few months we endured bi-weekly Dr. visits with ultrasounds every time. We virtually never had the same Dr. (as our Dr. was always busy) and even had a fun (not) experience with one doc telling us (very pleasantly) that it looked like there was a very serious problem. But once Rebekah emptied her bladder, he found out all was well. My feelings towards him were not too kindly for awhile after that. Rebekah finally went into the hospital for monitoring (in case the babies were having problems they could do an emergent c-section) @ 28 weeks. Less than one week later, the babies started having problems, but after a day they smoothed out. Almost exactly one week after that, they started having problems again and they were delivered one day shy of 31 weeks. The Dr. on-call at the time was Dr. Blea. One thing that was very good about this man was that he was confident and understanding. We weren't sure what was different this time rather than the last time (the previous week) but he helped me to understand and his confidence made a difficult decision much easier. I also felt like we made the decision, rather than him telling us what to do.

    The babies were born in the afternoon and a nurse thankfully took a bunch of pictures for us with our camera. And Dr. Blea was right, there was a serious knot in their two cords (there's a picture on the myspace page). Thankfully Rebekah recovered rapidly (although they had to use a "shoehorn" to get her bladder back in) and the babies did really well (not even needing to be intubated.) The next day however, they had worn their little lungs out and the tubes went in. Rebekah got out of the hospital after four days and moved directly over to the Ronald McDonald house. And that (hopefully) brings the story up to where we started blogging.