Like I Have Time For This?

A week after I’d been told by two doctors that I was being a skinny little wimp, and still dealing with this terrible pain in my right side, I went in to the local hospital for the big midpoint ultrasound. RegularDad took the day off of work to come along, and we were both eager to see the babies on screen.

The technician did her thing. She asked if we wanted to know the gender and we said yes and she said they were boys. And then she got rather quiet as she began to take various measurements. She got quieter and quieter and then she said she’d be right back and left the room.

She returned a minute later with a doctor: a smiling older gentleman who introduced himself as the head of maternal fetal medicine and then busied himself checking out what the technician wanted to show him, which was of course, vast quantities of amniotic fluid and two twins who were supposed to be identical but weren’t. One was twice the size of the other.

The doctor asked me how I’d been feeling. I told him about the pain I’d been in. He asked if I’d reported that to my obstetrician and I said yes, and then told him the story that I just told you, about the doctors who didn’t think much of my concerns (or my normally slender figure apparently). He patted me on the shoulder and then told us that we’d contracted TTTS and that in our case, the syndrome was advancing rapidly, and that it was time to take certain steps.

Like immediate bedrest. Like consideration of being airlifted to either Utah or Minnesota where I would be a good candidate for a new type of laser surgery in which they’d attempt to sever the crossed blood vessels in the placenta. Or like deciding to stay in state and try the more conventional treatment called Amnio-Reduction, in which they would drain the excess fluid and monitor the babies and see if maybe the syndrome would fade away on its own and the babies would even out. He said he’d treated quite a few cases of TTTS and had had good success.

We liked him, and agreed to try the Amnio-Reduction therapy. He scheduled my first amnio-reduction for later in the afternoon and then sent us out to have some lunch, to regroup, and also to go to my office and hand in my notice. Everyone I worked with was understanding, even though I’d only just started working there a few months ago. After we’d packed up my personal belongings, we headed back to the hospital for my first treatment.

This new, nice doctor met us at the reception area and told us that he’d informed my obstetrician of what was happening, and that she’d asked him to take over my case. He told us that he’d agreed to do that, as long as we said it was okay. We both nodded vigorously and said, “yes, please, absolutely, we want you to take over our case.

And so began my first amnio-reduction, in which they insert a large needle into the uterus and attach it to a pump and begin to drain the excess fluid. Once the needle was in and the pump running nicely, there wasn’t much to do except watch the twins on the tv screen. At one point, one of them kept kicking the needle and messing up the pump which made us laugh and joke a bit about a future field goal kicker.

That first session lasted an hour. They managed to drain one liter of fluid and then had to stop because I started having contractions. They injected me with Trebutaline to make the contractions stop, and the medicine made me shake visibly. Then they sent me home with instructions to return first thing in the morning for another session. I jittered and jived my way out to the parking lot, like a drunk emerging from a bad bout of the DT’s, and RegularDad drove us home, parked me on the couch with large quantities of orange juice and told me not to move.

He spent that evening researching TTTS on the Internet while I watched some cop show I’d never seen before called Law & Order. RegularDad’s research revealed that TTTS more often than not resulted in the loss of the pregnancy, and that babies that survived it often had serious birth complications and defects like heart failure, kidney failure and cerebral palsy. He printed out pages of this stuff and showed it to me, and I just looked away, back to the TV screen.

The next morning, I went in for another reduction. They took out another liter of fluid in another hour, and stopped again when I started having more contractions. They gave me another shot of Trebutaline and then, almost as an after thought, the doctor had the technician check my cervix via ultrasound. I was chatting with RegularDad and his mom who had come along for this visit, feeling good about getting another liter out. My abdomen was noticeably smaller and the pain was starting to fade.

But the doctor and the nurse and the technician got very busy around the computer equipment, and then started paging other staff members and someone suddenly appeared with a wheelchair, and I looked at the doctor and said, “What’s the matter? Aren’t I all right?”

“No,” he said. “You’re not. You’re going into labor.”