It was the morning of Wednesday December 4th and
Kevin and I were getting ready to head back to the hospital for my
surgery. We had to be there by 7:30 am
to get prepped for a 9 am surgery. Upon
arrival, they had me change into a hospital gown and compression
stockings. The nurses were hooking me up
to everything and putting an IV in me.
Kevin and I just sat there in silence as the commotion was happening
around us. The ‘unknown’ of what the
outcome was going to be like was hovering over us. I am sure Kevin was not only worried about
his sons, but he was worried about me as well.
My babies were my ONLY concern that morning.
They wheeled me into the room where I would recover and I
started to meet all of the nurses and surgical techs that would be in the O.R.
with me. They tried to distract me by
asking questions unrelated to children but that didn’t really help. They told me that the sedation that they were
going to give me would allow me to possibly hear what the Doctors are saying as
they were ‘Mapping’ out my placenta.
They said that the Doctors use funny words to name each vessel so I
shouldn’t be confused when I hear all the jibber jabber from them.
After a while, we
were ready to be wheeled in to the O.R.
Kevin would sit out in the waiting room and a nurse would come out occasionally to
update him on the surgery. I was holding
Kevin’s hand as they started wheeling me away and I started to cry. I was nervous about what was about to
transpire in the next few hours. Once in
the O.R., the anesthesiologist gave me the medicine and I was out. I didn’t hear or feel anything during the
whole surgery. When I started to come
to, I asked for more medicine since I was waking up. They said they were finishing up so I wasn’t
to have any more. After I heard they
were done I hesitated in fear of what the answer could be, but I asked, “How
are my boys?” The Doctor hesitated as
well and said that they would go talk to Kevin about it but that my boys are
‘still in there’. What did that
mean? What happened during this surgery?
They wheeled me back in to the recovery room. I had the chills so I was shaking like
crazy. After a couple minutes, Kevin and
Dr. Lim came in and stood on either side of me.
Kevin had tears in his eyes as he grabbed my hand. I was so confused. If my babies were still alive then why was he
crying? Dr. Lim began to tell me that the surgery was unsuccessful. Some of the arterial venus connections in the
placenta were too big for the equipment they had. The doctors had never seen vessels that big
before and because of their size, the utensil they would normally use to wrap
around the vessels to cauterize them could not fit around these large
vessels. And for this type of surgery,
they would have to get all of the vessels and not just some. So all in all, the surgery did not work, my
babies still had Twin to Twin, and now my uterus was irritated from the surgery
and preterm labor was still a major risk.
Since Colin had so much fluid in his sac, when the doctors
punctured my uterus with the scope during the surgery, a lot of his amniotic
fluid leaked in to my body and my body was just going to absorb it. They told me that I might have shoulder pain
in the next day or so due to that amniotic fluid in my system. And because a lot of his fluid was no longer
in his sac, I was still pregnant but I was significantly smaller in the
belly. The weekend before we got
diagnosed, Kevin said that it seemed I had gotten pregnant over night because I
grew significantly. My belly also became
very hard and it hurt to push on it. We
obviously didn’t know it at the time but that was because of the overwhelming
amount of fluid surrounding Colin.
After my one-hour recovery was done, the transport team came
to put me in an ambulance to take me down the road to University Hospital of
Cincinnati. There, I would be monitored
for preterm labor in their Labor and Delivery unit. As I was leaving, the nurses told me “Two
more weeks! You just need to be pregnant for at least two more weeks.” If I could make it to 27 weeks gestational
age, that would give my boys a much better chance at life. Once again the Unknown was staring us in the face.
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