Twins!

I managed to carry up to 38 weeks.  The normal c-section delivery date.  This time, the c-section was scheduled for a reasonable time, 2 o clock in the afternoon.  That meant I could get up at 5 in the morning have breakfast, do a slow preparation for the coming hospital stay and drive in at a lazy 10 in the morning. What joy!

By this time I was so excited to meet the twins, that I could hardly wait. Just the fact that I knew what was coming also made a huge difference to the whole experience. I wasn’t shocked at all the unpleasant things that had to be done to my poor body.  The catheter was inserted in the ward like before. I knew that I had to be shaved, so that was done at home in comfort and with my own razor.

The spinal block was inserted with the minimum fuss and pretty soon it was time for the doctor to take them out.  A minute of cutting and the Gynaecologist was ready. I had already told him in the corridor outside the theatre that Tristan was on the left and Zaan was on the right.

He took out the first little one and handed him to the Paediatrician. Initially he told the paediatrician, that it was Zaan, but when he looked again, he corrected himself.  Tristan was born at 20 minutes past 2 and Zaan at 21 minutes past 2.  Zaan was handed to a nurse that wrapped him in blankets.  He was the first one placed on my chest, while the paediatrician checked out Tristan.  I remember looking at Zaan’s little alien face, his eyes were so funny, when I heard the paediatrician say Tristan had an extra thumb.  How do you describe the feeling of horror that you get knowing there’s something abnormal. Hearing the theatre personnel talk about how common it is to get an extra little finger, but not so much an extra thumb.  Turns out that isn’t the only abnormality he was born with, but more of that later.

Next Tristan was placed on my chest while Zaan was looked at.  Tristan weighed in at 1.990kg and Zaan at 1.635kg. Both 42cm long.  Tristan’s Apgar score at 1 minute a nice 8/10 then at 10 minutes 9/10 and Zaan’s at 1 minute 7/10 then 8/10 at 10 minutes. For twins I think this was quite a good show.

Both of them were placed in one incubator and taken up to the ward, while my blood pressure plummeted and the gynaecologist finished sewing me up.

By the time I got back to the ward, mother-in-law was there with Rivan to look at his new brothers.  It was while the twins were in the ward nursery that they realised something was wrong.  When Zaan was taken out of the incubator, he started turning blue.  Tristan was brought to me in the room, but Zaan was taken to NICU.  Hubby came to tell me that something was wrong and that he was going down with Zaan.  As soon as Zaan was in the NICU he came back to tell me that the NICU staff had said, with Zaan’s birth weight being so low (called dismature in medical parlance), he should have been sent to NICU in any case.

I was still hooked up to all the pipes and unable to walk. Tristan was kept in the nursery the first night, while I struggled with a maddening pain in my shoulder. The more I tried to explain to the nurse that I was in pain and wanted something for the pain, the more she said it’s a wind and nothing would help for it.  If only she had explained that a bubble of air had gone up my spinal column, I might have understood better. But in pain and at night I thought she meant I had gas! And seriously gas does not give you a pain in the shoulder!

The next morning early the gynaecologist gave the go ahead for the catheter and drip to be removed.  The moment the nurses left my room after all those pipes were taken out, I was in the bathroom taking a bath.  Dressed in clean pj’s, I was ready to tackle the halls to visit Zaan.  The moment I appeared with Tristan in my arms the nurses asked me to please put him back in the crib and push the crib around if I have to go somewhere.  I had to make a u-turn to go get the crib. Back at the nurses station they wanted to know where I’m going. Duh, I’m on my way to the NICU.  But again they had a better plan.  They decided that Tristan should stay at the nursery and that I needed a wheelchair to go down to the NICU.

Finally being pushed by a nurse I was allowed to go see Zaan.  As a mother you expect to look at your baby the first time and love him or her to bits.  The feelings that I felt for him, while he was lying on my chest in the theatre was gone. I looked at that strange looking little baby on this chest height nursing bed and I couldn’t love him.  He wasn’t a part of me. This wasn’t what I signed up for.  A small little baby with a flat spot on one side of his head, hooked up to tubes and wires.  There was no way that I could hold him. Not like that.  I had already started breastfeeding Tristan, but I felt revulsion to think that I had to share my breasts with this little baby.  Do you have any idea how sickening it feels to know that you are such a bad mother that you even hate your own child?

I stayed for a short while, making all the right noises and then asked them to take me back.

Later that day the paediatrician came to my room to look at Tristan and bind off his extra thumb.  He also told me that he had ordered some tests for Zaan and asked for a second opinion from a doctor specialising in genetic disorders.  He explained that he suspected Zaan might have Down Syndrome.

The very first thing that went through my mind was “No, it’s not possible. He must have made a mistake”. The next thing was thinking that it must be something less drastic than Down Syndrome.  I told him to check for Marvan Syndrome since my mom had told me my dad has this in a very light form.

Now in my mind Marvan Syndrome wasn’t anything as bad as Down Syndrome, since according to my mom my dad had it and he was fine.  Down syndrome to me meant mental retardation and I couldn’t cope with a baby that was slow. I wouldn’t know how to handle him. To tell you the truth I’m an intellectual snob.  I know I’m smarter than average and expect my kids to be too. Whether I actually am smarter than average of course is a different story, but since I’m telling this tale, we’ll leave it at that.

It’s amazing how we can live in ignorance and not pay attention to what is going on around us, until something like this hits you in the face.  Suddenly I was faced with limited information and way too much time to think.  Not that the nurses helped in this instance.  One would come in and tell me that my baby didn’t have the telltale signs of Down syndrome. The next would come in and offer sympathy for something that hadn’t been confirmed yet.

But worse was coming.  That evening my husband and I saw the genetic specialist, who confirmed the Down Syndrome diagnoses.  Although formal diagnoses would have to wait for the Fish test that would take 6 weeks, she told us that in her experience, Zaan was a classic case of Down Syndrome.  Worst of all was that over and above the Down Syndrome, Zaan had a hole in his heart.

One of the tests confirmed that Zaan had an Atrioventricular canal defect. To put it in layman terms, he had a 1cm hole between the left and right side of his 3cm heart with a single valve in-between instead of two.  Another test showed that one hemisphere of Zaan’s brain had not developed fully.  Until today I don’t know if that ever rectified itself, or if it would have affected Zaan adversely.  We never got to the point were it would have made a difference.

Finding out that your child is disabled or has an abnormality shatters all your most basic expectations.  Just taking in the change in your life takes weeks to absorb and accept.  When your pregnant and even before that, you don’t expect to have a disabled child. You don’t plan for it and you don’t prepare for it. It’s just something that happens to other people.

After having the Down Syndrome confirmed, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I specifically didn’t want any sympathy. I didn’t want any advice whatsoever and I definitely did not want anyone to try and cheer me up. My life was changed and it would never go back to what it was supposed to be. All I wanted was to be left alone. How could anyone understand my feelings?  It took me ages before I was able to talk about Zaan’s Down Syndrome.  Let’s face it, I was ashamed of having a disabled child.

One of the books that I read described finding out about a disability as grieving. And that is exactly what happened to me. I grieved for the perfect baby that I was expecting. The life that I had planned for my child. You even go through the same process as grieving. First there is shock and denial, then there is anger, bargaining, guilt, sadness and depression. Finally there is acceptance.

Gone was the dream of walking in the shops with my beautiful twins.  Getting all the smiles for having produced such little darlings. In it’s place was a little alien with special needs that might or might not look like us.

The doctor wisely prescribed a few tranquilisers for me. Those helped me through that night and the next morning. By the time I was discharged with Tristan, I was over the worst of the shock, but still struggling to accept the change in our lives.

But it wasn’t all sadness and horror in the hospital. There were those funny moments too.  Tristan has a very small mouth.  I spend hours looking at this little boy’s face and the one comparison I drew was with his mouth.  Tristan’s mouth was just as wide as his nose. His whole mouth could be covered by a 10 cent piece. Now imagine this little mouth trying to take in the nipple to breastfeed.

Now first of, I was an experienced breastfeeding mommy. I breastfed Rivan until the age of 14 months. I knew all the pitfalls of unsuccessful breastfeeding.  All the do’s and don’ts.  So my part in this deal was under control.  Too bad no one told me that the breastfeeding manual wasn’t a pre-birth prerequisite for babies.  Tristan was as clueless as you could get.  And obviously that made me forget every single thing I thought I knew about breastfeeding.

I sat on that bed, with three nurses standing around me, each one taking a turn trying to get him to latch.  Finally another nurse was imported from the third floor to help me get him on.  Tristan’s small little head was repeatedly smashed into my breast, while I sat there exposed to the world (and all the nurses in attendance).  But in the end between the two of us we managed and Tristan soon realised that breast is food.

Breastfeeding turned into the best and worst of that time.  Once Tristan took to breastfeeding, he was the easiest of all my kids to feed.  But together with that was the feelings of guilt for not being able to express enough milk for Zaan as well.  I felt jealous at the thought of keeping milk from Tristan to give to Zaan, and I felt guilty for not forcing myself to express more than I was able to, while feeding Tristan at the same time.  I knew that some women successfully breastfed twins and that my body was supposed to adapt to feeding two babies.  That if I could only will it so, my body would comply and that the mere fact that I wasn’t able to was due to my lack of desire to feed Zaan milk from my body.

After the normal four days and three nights, hubby picked up Tristan and me for our trip home from the hospital.  What should have been a joyous trip with two babies in the back turned into a discussion on how we were going to tell the family about Zaan. Because I was still unable to talk about his Down Syndrome, I ended up sending a sms to friends and family to say that he had Down Syndrome and that the doctors had advised us not to socialise a lot while he is still small.  He probably had an underdeveloped immune system, plus with his heart condition he couldn’t be allowed to get sick.

When we got home, the alterations that should have been finished while I was in hospital, was still very much on going.  There we were with a tarp nailed to the living room to keep the dust and cold out of the house. We ended up living in the main bedroom, as far away from the cold living room as possible.

Every day I would pack up Tristan and we would take the 40 minute drive to the hospital to go visit Zaan.  The NICU was very pro-family and they promoted the idea of putting the twins together each day that we visited.  Most days hubby and Rivan would go with. Other days it would be only me and Tristan.

Zaan moved from the chest height nursing bed to a crib in the sun area of the NICU as he picked up weight and got bigger.  After three weeks of visiting Zaan, the day finally came when we could take him home.  Those daily visits helped me to get to know my own child. Although the nurses thought he would only be going home once he was capable of drinking from a bottle and no longer dependent on oxygen, the doctors had told us that he would most likely go home with oxygen and a feeding tube.

Sharing a crib in the NICU

Chapter 5

A second pregnancy

By the time Rivan was eighteen months old, I had decided that it was time to start trying for another baby.  He was going to a nursery school three days a week and I was working again.  Not that I informed hubby about it.  I didn’t want the gap between the two children to be too big.  And I thought I was ready to take on a second child.  Now my nature is to just let mother nature take her turn.  And as you’ve already seen, I don’t do the counting thing at all. What I do remember is that I had a very short and light period towards the end of November 2006.

We have this Christmas tradition.  Every year the bigger part of hubby’s family and friends get together at someone’s house.  Each family brings a salad and cold meat.  Whoever hosts the Christmas lunch decided who will bring what.  That Christmas I was in charge of bringing the pork roast.  So on Christmas Eve I had this roast in the oven baking.  As this roast was baking I was starting to worry.  The meat smelled off and I couldn’t decide if I should rush out to get another roast or not.  Hubby couldn’t smell anything wrong with it and so, I carried on with the preparation. I must admit that once the meat was done and cooled down, I couldn’t smell the bad odour that was bugging me while it was cooking.

On Christmas morning as we walked into mother-in-law’s house, I told her that I wasn’t sure about the pork roast since it smelled bad to me. She also assured me that it seemed fine to her. Softly she asked me not to mention it to anyone else. Just as well. It turned out that the pork roast was fine. I was the one with the bad nose.

Added to the bad nose, suddenly I started feeling queasy during lunch.  Now I love my food, always have and always will.  That day I didn’t eat very much.  The salads were more appetising than the meat and that was about all I ate.  When I was pregnant with Rivan I never really got morning sickness.  About the only thing I got was slight queasiness when I was in a car.  Sort of like motion sickness.

On Boxing day I started suspecting that I might be pregnant again and had to wait until the next working day, which again turned into another two days of waiting, before going to a local chemist to get a home pregnancy test.  By now I was an old hand with this and on 28 December I knew I was pregnant again.

Hubby didn’t like the gynaecologist that delivered Rivan and I was told to look for another doctor that would not be charging us an arm and a leg every time I went for a check up.  This sparked a half day marathon phone session. Phoning every doctor that practiced at the hospital of our choice.  Finally we settled on our choice and tried to get an appointment.  And of course the doctor was still on leave.  By the time I got an appointment I thought I would be about 5 or 6 weeks along.  Hubby went with me for the first visit.  The doctor who was more mature than the last one.  He asked me why I was there. After I told him that I was pregnant, when my last period was, that I had a c-section previously, but would rather do a VBAC this time around, he told me to undress and get on the bed.

He started up the ultrasound machine once I was lying down. Yes, you guessed it, that ultimate horror of horrors, the dreaded interior ultrasound.  The doctor started the scan, then suddenly exclaimed: “Wait!”  He switched the ultrasound off.  By then I had already seen something very suspicious, but it’s not like I’m trained in reading an ultrasound.  Plus I don’t think it really made sense at that time.  He took an empty CD out of the cupboard and loaded it into his machine. “Let’s start again. What do you see?” “Uh, Two?”

You guessed it.  I was pregnant with twins.  I was also much further along than I had thought.  Turns out the light period wasn’t a period at all.  It had to have been implantation bleeding. They were most likely fraternal twins since each one was in a separate birth sack. Not that this kept me from hoping against all odds for identical twins. Identical twins are the cream of the crop, aren’t they?

This sparked another internet search, this time on twin pregnancies. I can tell you one thing, I was feeling very special.  I wanted to tell every person I saw that I was expecting twins. I could just imagine walking around in the shops with my beautiful blue-eyed boy and my two cute blue-eyed baby girls in a double stroller.  Reality turned out so much different from those early dreams.

Carrying twins turned out to be much harder than carrying only one. My research told me to expect double the discomfort and pregnancy symptoms, and boy were they right.  My first heads up on this was the low blood pressure.  Because your body suddenly produces a lot more blood, you get low blood pressure.  I couldn’t manage to stand up for any length of time.  Queues just didn’t do it for me.  The moment the white spots started flickering in front of my eyes, I’d sit down in the queue.  As soon as I felt better I would get back up.  In the Telkom queue I sat down a total of 5 times.  Supermarket queues tended to be slightly better, at least I could hang onto the trolley.

In the beginning you worry about what other people might think of someone who turns white as a sheet, gets visibly clammy and then proceeds to sit down on the floor in the middle of the shop.  It’s not as if anyone could see that I was pregnant.  Even pregnant with twins it was still to early for me to show a preggy bump.  That means it just left things looking like I could be coming of a bender, or drug related, you know, something illegal or uncivilised. Later on it got to the point where I really no longer cared what the other people in the queue thought. Also there was that silly grin stuck on my face.

Next in line was the tiredness.  Moms with toddlers know what it means to be tired, now try double the pregnancy tiredness added to that.  This time around the nausea stayed away as well, but I had the worst meat aversion ever.  Hubby had to either make his own steak or ask his mom to do it for him.  The poor man was stuck with salad for dinner, every single night for 5 months.

Towards the end, or rather from about 5 months the weight distribution also became hectic.  By month 4 I was already in maternity wear.  In desperation I finally bought a maternity belt that I wore every single day.  It’s amazing how much two long pieces of elastic can make a difference to the way your back feels at the end of the day.

Of course just like with Rivan, by the time I was 4 months pregnant I already had 2 girl names picked out for the twins.  New names, since I suddenly didn’t like the one I came up with for Rivan. They would have been called Danelle and Timone. Imagine my disappointment when the scan said another 2 boys.

The doctor thought it was quite interesting, even joking about how I was scared our surname would die out.  After the name debacle with Rivan, I decided I wouldn’t be caught flat footed again.  I started internet name trawling.  I hit on two nice big baby name websites and proceeded to copy and paste every single male name except those starting with J, G, R and S into an excel spreadsheet.  Then I had to delete all the duplicates and finally I could start sorting the ones that I liked from those that I didn’t.

That spreadsheet contained more than 6400 names and I looked at every single one of them.  First cut was a simple maybe or no. That left me with a short list of 67 names.  I tried reading them to hubby, but he refused to listen to such a long list.  Then I combined all the names that were pronounced the same, but spelled differently and put them together.  That left me with a list of 50.  I finally managed to get hubby to listen to my list.  As I read a name to him, he would say yes or no.  After this exercise the list was finally down to manageable proportions.  Seven names on the short list.  I told hubby to pick his favourite: Tristan and I picked my favourite: Zaan.

Maybe we should have given Tristan’s name a second thought since Tristan means “The noisy one, Tumult”. And believe me, he is noisy and tumultuous.  While they were in the womb I could already distinguish between the two of them.  Tristan was lying in the left back while Zaan was right front.  Tristan was the kicker that used to give fast and heavy kicks, while Zaan was more of a stretcher.  He’d move slower and gentler.

With Rivan I never went for the tour that the hospital gives to expecting mothers.  With the twins, I had some questions, so I took one afternoon off and toured through the hospital with one of the sisters.

Since I had been there previously, all the things that were dealt with on the regular tour, was old news to me. But there were only two of us on the tour that day, and the nurse was able to answer all the questions we could think of.

For me the most important thing was having a look at the NICU (Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit).  My internet research had told me that the chances of at least one of my babies ending up in the NICU was good, since a lot of twins were born prem.  Of course my hopes of a VBAC were dashed as soon as the doctor found out it was twins.  He told me point blank that I would have another caesarean.

By the time I was doing the tour I was only a couple of weeks away from the planned caesarean date and the ultrasounds had estimated both babies’ weight at around 2 kg’s already. So my pit stop in the NICU was according to me mainly an in-case-of visit.  Little did I know that I would get to know that NICU quite well.

Facing each other. Zaan left - Tristan on the right

Chapter 4