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The thoughts of a Father of Twins

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Our twins are born

Our babies were born by cesarian section at 35 weeks. That’s 5 weeks early for a singleton pregnancy.

It’s not uncommon for twins to be born early. In fact, about 57% of twins are born at, or before 37 weeks, and 37 weeks is considered full term for twins.

Twin pregnancies are classed as “High Risk” and there are a number of reasons for this. It’s not something to automatically worry about. There is so much information available regarding the facts and science behind it that trying to explain it here would be foolish of me – I’m no doctor. You can find help and good advice from babycentre and Tamba here. There are lots of other resources out there and it’s definitely worth taking a look well before your babies arrive.

All the research we had done during our pregnancy told us that premature birth was a real possibility but I don’t think we found anything that prepared us for what was to come. I’m not sure that anything can.

This is not a horror story and I don’t think our experience was all that different to many people in our situation, but I think I was probably expecting the Disney version of events rather than the reality.

Because a twin pregnancy is high risk, we received scans on a monthly basis after the 12 week scan revealed it was twins (and what a piece of news that was!). My partner, Loll had a great pregnancy for the first 7 months, we were blessed. She never experienced morning sickness, or many of the other common complaints of pregnancy often associated with twin pregnancy.

The problems started at 32 weeks when the first signs of preeclampsia showed in routine tests. A definite diagnosis couldn’t be made for weeks because Lolls body was fighting back against it and, on many days, it was winning. There were absolutely no noticeable physical symptoms and it became a worrying and frustrating time with almost daily scans and other tests that sometimes resulted in overnight hospital stays. It can be scary when all of a sudden it feels that events are rapidly moving out of your sphere of control.

Three weeks after the preeclampsia first appeared, so did our twins. We were getting used to the usual daily battle with raised blood pressure and protein markers so when Lolls blood results showed that her platelet levels had dropped, things took a sudden turn for the worse and our consultant announced that they needed to be born. The last hope of natural birth was gone but everyone being here and safe was our main goal. We were told that there were insufficient staff in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to be able to give our babies the care they would need. They were now searching for other hospitals to take us. This was a hammer blow. We’d got to know the staff and hospital over the previous weeks and months. We were happy and comfortable with the care we were receiving so the prospect of moving to somewhere unknown was a chilling one. Unfortunately, worse was to come. Searches had failed to turn up a hospital to house us all and so now the search had changed to find a hospital to house the twins while Loll remained in our original hospital after the birth. This had barely sunk in before the search shifted again to keeping Loll in the original hospital while separating the twins to different hospitals. Thankfully the decision was taken to deliver and care for our babies in the same hospital and a 24 hour period of incredible stress was over – for about six hours. Then… cesarian. If we’d had a rigid birth plan it would have been ripped up by now.

Operating theatres are seldom as they appear on television. Ours was quite a drab sort of place. Nobody ran around shouting “Stat!”. It felt more like being in someones Dads workshop. Loll was given a spinal anaesthetic whilst I got changed into scrubs. Our consultant was going to perform the cesarian and that made us happy and more relaxed again. She is a kind and clever person and I think she stood at around 5 feet  tall (if wearing  high heels). Someone offered her a box to stand on so she could reach to do the operation. She replied, with some irritation, that she was already standing on one and could we please get on with it. It made us both smile.

Loll was uncomfortable with the effects of the anaesthetic. Her chest weighed heavily down on her and breathing became difficult and slightly frightening. Feeling fuzzy and not in control, a cesarian was never part of our plan and I don’t think we ever really expected it would work out that way.

The one thing that had been on our birth plan (if we really ever had one) was that Loll wanted me to tell her the sex of the babies when they arrived. We decided early on not to find out, having concluded that there are few enough lovely surprises in life so why spoil ours? As a friend in the pub said “It’s like getting your Christmas present but knowing in September what it’s going to be”. Once the operation started there seemed to be some poking around for a while, some general chatter and then, all of a sudden, twin one arrived. It didn’t happen in slow motion and soft focus, our first baby was there. He was given a quick once over by extremely dextrous professionals and handed to us. A purple little chap. I was called over to cut the cord and tell Loll what we had. After months of waiting, wondering and impatience to meet them, we had a boy.

Cutting the cord is a bit tougher than you might think and, when there’s another baby hot on the heels of the first, you can’t expect to get all misty eyed and hope that everyone else is going to wait for you to catch up. Our second baby arrived three minutes after the first. Loll couldn’t wait for me to get back over there and dither about a bit more so she asked the midwife what we had. I’ll never forget the elation in her voice as she shouted over to me that it was a girl.

That was the day our children were born.

The hours and weeks after that moment became another time, another stage on our journey. As I look back at it now, it seems a world away yet it’s only seven months.

We have a greater capacity to cope in stressful situations than we appreciate. If I could offer advice to a Father of Twins at the end of this day on your journey, it would be this:

Breathe.

Stop for a moment and take in what has just happened.

You will have work ahead of you but, for now, enjoy the moment and don’t worry too much about the coming hours, weeks, months and… you get the idea.