Twice the Luck

It felt pretty overwhelming to walk out of that first appointment, knowing that I was pregnant with twins and just expected to go back to living my life as scheduled.  I want to talk a little bit about that time after you’ve been told its twins and that everything is about to change and before you get sucked into the hospital pipeline of appointments, appointments, and more appointments.

Blood Work

It was very important to both me and my husband to have as much information about this pregnancy as possible which is why we chose to do the genetic testing.  We are fortunate to have very good insurance but it’s worth saying that Panorama, the company our hospital uses, caps the cost of testing so if a patient’s insurance does not cover it, they can submit a claim to Panorama and the company will pay the difference of that out of pocket cost.

Our results came back low risk for everything so we didn’t do any additional testing but from what I understood from questioning our doctor was that any high risk results would have referred us to the hospital’s genetic counselors and where they would have run more specialized tests to identify what is going on and probably put us on additional monitoring.

Whether or not you do genetic testing is a very personal choice and there are no wrong answers.  It is so hard to go around your daily life with so much hope in your belly but also that uncertainty.  You are caught between opposing emotions, never completely sure whether or not it is going to be okay.  Do what feels right for you. Your choice is your power.

What are the twins?

Now for the fun part.  We were upfront with our doctor that we wanted to know the sex right away.  We weren’t interested in doing any type of gender reveal but honestly, we needed all the help we could get coming up with names so having a direction to work with early on sounded so helpful.  Even though we said we wanted to know, my test results still came on multiple pages to give us the option.

The first page was a summary from our doctor just telling what the results said and assuring us that everything looked good and then there came the word of caution – only go on to the last page if we were ready to know what we were having.

Now, I had been checking my hospital account every morning for several days looking for these results and when they came in, I was looking at my phone at work.  I would like to say that I hesitated, that I thought of reading it for the first time with my husband but no –  I read on right away.

We had hopes going into this.  Very vague hopes – we really just wanted happy, healthy babies.  We were pretty certain that we only wanted two kids so ideally, we figured we wanted one of each. We also thought that our twins might have an easier time in life if they were not identical, not constantly mistaken for someone else, not automatic saddled with the assumption that just because they look alike, they are alike.  Also, fraternal twin pregnancies have less risk associated with them.  So in a perfect world, we figured fraternal twins, one boy, one girl.

Two lines of bold text spelled out a different but still very perfect world – identical twin boys.  I started smiling with an idiot in the middle of the job site and I stepped away to call my husband.

“Do you want to know?”

“Right now?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, yeah.”

I can still hear the smile in his voice when I told him and he immediately asked “Really?”  While it wasn’t what we thought we wanted, we wanted them, in whatever form they were going to be so I couldn’t have been happier that they were identical twin boys because they were our babies and they couldn’t have been anything else.

Telling Family and Friends

I think that telling the people you care about that you are pregnant is a very personal decision.  I don’t know who needs to hear this but I’m going to say it anyway – you and your partner do not owe anyone a pregnancy announcement until you are good and ready.  Expecting a child is a life changing event – expecting twins completely alters your reality and it is entirely reasonable that it might take you some time to process everything.  Be kind to yourself and give yourself the time.

My husband and I had no problem keeping our pregnancy to ourselves when we thought it was only one baby.  I had run my symptoms by a few friends who are moms to see what they thought so they knew. But knowing there were two little beans inside me made it so much harder to keep it from the rest of our friends and family.  My husband thoroughly enjoyed coming up with off the cuff ways of telling people.  His favorite was telling them that everything looked good and both babies had good heartbeats and waiting until they caught up to what he had just said.

The Run Down on Running

This was the start of a bit of a tricky period of running for me. I didn’t look pregnant but I had already started to feel it more than I thought I should. There was the almost ever present nausea and fatigue but there was something else. I was constantly out of breath. A single flight of stairs winded me. It was humbling.

Our brains are funny things. Incredible in some ways and ridiculously useless in others. I knew I was pregnant. I knew from talking to my doctor that being winded more easily was because my body was making and filtering so much more blood. I knew these things but I still struggled with how I was feeling, with how much less my body was able to give. That’s how it felt at the time

I’m going to tell you what I should have told myself. Be gentle with yourself. It might feel like your body is able to do less but that’s only in how you are measuring it. In reality, it is doing so much more. Make sure you talk with you doctors but staying active in whatever way feels the most like you, whether it is running or lifting weights, is always worth doing. It’s going to feel different, it’s going to be harder but it’s worth it, for your babies and for you.