Why I stopped blogging….

I’ve been asked by several people how come I stopped blogging during my pregnancy. I guess I didn’t realize how many people were following my adventures . Its not that I didn’t want to share this exciting time with everyone… it was because I had a really hard time talking about it…

If you met up with me during my last trimester I would have described the pregnancy as “hard”. Not a lot of people knew what was going on, and hard was a word no one batted an eyelash at or asked me to elaborate on. I had twins, and a normal pregnancy can be “hard” so everyone just assumed I meant physically taxing but there was so much more going on…

I remember the day of the ultrasound so vividly…. it was our 19 week scan and I remember being so excited because we were receiving the genders of the babies. The technician asked us to look away every time she did the lower body measurements and when she was done she was going to write the genders on a card and seal the envelope. Our gender reveal was only 4 days away and the thought of waiting 4 more days for the genders felt like an eternity!

The ultrasound took 3 hours. After the second hour I was starting to worry that there was something wrong. Our appointments usually took 2 hours, but 3 hours seemed a little excessive. Because we had to look away for more then half of the measurements it was hard to tell if there was an issue or the technician was just really slow. When we were told to go and wait in one of the consultation rooms I knew something was wrong. I had that sinking feeling and the news we were about to received confirmed my fears.

One of our babies had something wrong and we were told they thought it might be a sacrococcygeal teratoma. They dubbed it as “querry” and would need to investigate further. These SCT’s were rare and I would be the first twins case in Western Canada, so it made it VERY complicated. They wanted to get a specialist in and do a 3D scan ASAP. What was supposed to be an exciting day turned into a fear that no one could ever explain.

It was hard to celebrate our two babies and their genders that following weekend when we got the news. Fear had set in and we had been advised to think about termination of the pregnancy. I was torn with emotion… should we go head with the gender reveal?! Are we making a mistake by celebrating?! I had the million dollar family – one boy and one girl. A dream family, and yet I could not be happy about this joyous moment.

After being transferred to a high risk clinic and scanned 2 more times we were told we had 2 weeks left to make a definitive decision to “safely” terminate the pregnancy. Yes you read that right – and yet it was said so nonchalantly. A pregnancy that took us 5 years to accomplish, 2 rounds of IVF and a round of donor eggs. $40,000 dollars donated to the fertility gods and said to us like we could just try again and get pregnant next month…

I remember getting really mad at the doctor and asking for facts. She had not personally dealt with this before and had “read all about these cases”. And yet here she was handing out advice and advising me about termination. She made me feel guilty about wanting to give Baby B a fighting chance and scolded me about Baby A being perfectly healthy and that I should be focusing on that. I lost my $#it. You see, only 50% of babies with SCT’s make it. And they make your pregnancy dangerous, high risk (on top of a high risk twin pregnancy already) and complicated. Add in a a second baby and you risk losing both. It was a gamble, but I couldn’t bear to think of carrying one living child and one deceased child in me for another 17 weeks. Baby B deserved to live just as much as Baby A and if we lost both then I guess this pregnancy wasn’t meant to be. But I was not going to be the one to terminate based on “If’s or why’s”.

Guilt. Fear. Worry… those are some of the words that describe how I felt the remainder of my pregnancy. Did I (we) make the right choice? What kind of life would we be giving Baby B if they made it. Only time would tell if we had made the right decision and that weighed heavily on me everyday…