Twice the Luck

I want to start this by saying that we were one of the lucky ones – we found out at our first appointment that we were having twins which is not always the case.  We went in somewhere around eight or nine weeks, not really sure what the timeline is exactly because I did no tracking going into trying to get pregnant – I didn’t want the pressure.  It still blows my mind that even though I knew I was pregnant at four or five weeks, I was just allowed to exist, unsupervised, for those four weeks while carrying something so important.

Taking the Test

I have to admit that taking a pregnancy test and getting a positive result was not the emotional wellspring that I had seen in movies and in people’s videos.  I was already pretty sure that I was pregnant before I even took the test – I had had a lot of early symptoms which I had attributed to being sensitive to hormones.  Even though there was little doubt in my mind, I didn’t know the exact date when I would late for my period because I had stopped tracking but I had a rough idea and knew I was either late or very close to it and that I probably needed a positive pregnancy to get the next step moving forward for our first prenatal appointment.

So I bought a test, got home from work, and actually read the instructions.  I had to wait three minutes – an eternity.  So while I was waiting those three minutes, I opened the news app on my phone and saw the headline for the Uvalde school shooting.  And then there were two lines on that plastic stick and I was faced with the reality of the world I was bringing a child into.  

It took time for me to sort through all of my emotions – the joy, the trepidation, the gratitude and that is normal.  Please don’t feel like there is something wrong with you if you don’t burst into happy tears when some lines appear on something you just peed on.  It does not mean you are any less thrilled to be pregnant.  Everyone is different – stay your course.

First Appointment

Once I had my positive test, I reached out to my gynecologist and asked what the next step was.  After that, I got a phone call from the scheduling department and was officially moved from the care of my gynecologist to an obstetrics team.  Our hospital orders obstetrics care into “pods” which are groups of about six health care professionals and come in two flavors – midwife, made up of midwives, or nurse/doctor, consisting of nurse practitioners and doctors.  Over the phone to schedule my first appointment, I was asked to choose and of course had no idea which way to go.  After some assurance that I could change pods, I was scheduled to see a nurse practitioner.

And then we had to wait and pretend like absolutely nothing had changed even though, regardless of how everything ultimately turned out, life was never going to be the same.

My husband and I walked into our first prenatal appointment at eight or nine weeks pregnant assuming that everything was normal.  We had joked that since we wanted two children, twins would get it all out of the way quickly, one and done style.  We made these jokes without any niggling idea that it might be true.  We are very ordinary people and figured that nothing as extraordinary as twins could happen to us.

We talked with the nurse practitioner, were assured that everything I was feeling was very typical, and touched briefly on the nitty-gritty business of having a baby.  We got a lot of pamphlets and paperwork and signed up for Panorama genetic testing and the nurse practitioner put in orders for an initial round of bloodwork to check that all was normal with me before I got too far along in pregnancy.

As the appointment was winding down, the nurse practitioner asked if we wanted to hear the heartbeat.  Of course we did.  Laid back on the examine table with its crinkling paper covering, I pulled up my shirt and folded down the waistband of my shorts.  She rolled the doppler machine from where it was hiding behind the door and squirted some cold ultrasound gel on my lower belly.  First there was static and then the slow, steady throb on my own heartbeat.  

Even after a few minutes of trying, there was no sound besides my heartbeat and I got my first taste of fear.  Our nurse was wonderful and was quick to reassure us that it’s not uncommon to not be able to find a heartbeat this early on.  Instead, she said they had a new portable ultrasound machine the department had just received.  Why don’t we try that?  It sounded like the perfect way to sooth our now mounting anxiety.

She left the room and within a few minutes wheeled in the tall, slender ultrasound machine.  She slid the probe back over my belly and I craned my neck to look at the screen.  Within moments, a little gray jelly bean floated onto the screen with tiny fluttering fins for arms and legs.  Definitely a baby.

Apparently since the ultrasound machine is fairly expensive, she needed a few more pictures and angles to justify its use.  She rotated the probe maybe a half turn and then, “What’s that?”  Everything stopped.  In the chair next to the bed, my husband stood up.  “I think there’s two.”

Honestly, my first reaction was to laugh, shocked, mildly hysterical laughter.  My husband reached for my hand and a second tiny jelly bean with fins appeared on the screen.  The nurse practitioner left to find a doctor to verify and we were left staring at each other, laughing and maybe a little bit of crying.  Five minutes later, a doctor came in and confirmed that yes, there were definitely two babies in there, both swimming around, both with heart rates in the mid 140s.  Then it was all a blur, the appointment was over, I had to pee in a cup, and we went off to the bloodwork lab giddy and a little giggly.

What I wish had been different

While finding out we were having twins was one of those sterling moments that I will never forget, I do wish everything had not been quite so rushed afterward.  Since we didn’t find out until the end of the appointment, we were out of time.  Twins had changed everything – all the questions we had asked earlier paled in comparison to the battery of things we wanted to know now.  It was fine – there was nothing too urgent but it would have been nice to get some more information.

The Run Down on Running

At this point, running and working out had pretty much been business as usual.  Sure, there were definitely some days where I was dragging and everything felt awkward, like I was moving through mud.  On those days, I made sure to go slow and not push.  That has been one of the hardest lessons of this pregnancy for me to learn – this is not the time to push through.  If you feel slow, go slow.  I still did harder workouts and some speedwork but I kept those to my good days.  It was not always easy to do those mental gymnastics of taking a step back when I needed to, when I didn’t feel quite right, but tired to look at it as another type of training – already gaining the flexibility needed to maintain an active lifestyle with two babies in tow.