Name:
Location: New York, New York, United States

My move to New York has become something of a challenge and a tremendous source of entertainment for friends and co-workers. So I've started this blog. Hope to amuse and educate you.

Monday, July 11, 2005

On Becoming Parents

On an ordinary evening in March, the EPT home pregnancy test showed two little pink lines. Animesh and I were over the moon. Screaming, laughing, hugs and kisses all over. One week later we went to the doctor and found out that there were two sacs, two placentas and hence two embryos. In everyday parlance, we were expecting fraternal twins.

Now everyone who hears this will tell you they always wanted twins. That you 'are getting two for the price of one'. Or 'you hit the jackpot!' While that’s exactly how we felt, twin pregnancies are actually fraught with danger. The risks of a miscarriage in twin pregnancies are three times that with a singleton. Birth defects, pre-term labor and maternal health risks are also much higher. We found this out by googling 'twin pregnancy' immediately after getting home (Animesh has always out-googled the doctor for information, and at times I felt ridiculous asking the doctor about things I really had no business knowing). But the good doctor assured us that despite the risks he had just delivered healthy twins to a fifty (!!) year old lady and that she had actually gone full term. And hadn't Julia Roberts just had twins too?! I felt better already.

The next few months were quite wonderful. Every doctor's visit confirmed that I was having twins and that they were going to be wonderful. They were right on schedule too, developing a head, arms, fingers even. True, they looked like alien lizards for the most part, but they kicked about and did summersaults like the most adorable ultrasound babies I ever saw. I haven't seen any other ultrasound babies, to be honest I was never interested, but suffice it to say that by some unexplained magic, alien lizards in your tummy begin to look adorable when you are expecting. Their heartbeat, which you can hear after 8 weeks, sounded like a runaway bullet train. We learned a lot of baby terminology. For instance, the lower baby (the one closer to your cervix), is called the 'presenting' baby or baby 'A'. This makes the other baby, baby 'B'. Baby-a and baby-b never touch each other because membranes separate them. So they lounge about in the womb in complete harmony like very well behaved roommates. My doctor quickly labeled baby-b the 'devil child' because she would turn away from the camera whenever he wanted a good shot. But he managed to show us a shot of her swallowing (amniotic fluids). Now swallowing is not cute by any stretch of imagination. According to sources on google, the baby starts taking in a lot of fluids at 16 weeks and begins to produce urine. This is then ejected into the amniotic fluid, which it lives in and periodically swallows! Ewww!

Pregnant women experience all manner of unpleasant symptoms, but I had none of them. I was never dizzy, rarely nauseous and only mildly emotional. I did not have any food cravings that I remember... I was just always very hungry. But if its OK to pig out when you are 'eating for two' then its definitely OK when you're 'eating for three'; and I did. I had nuts, milk and fruits all the time. I ate lunch twice and sometimes dinner too. Despite my gargantuan appetite, I had some difficulty putting on weight in the beginning, but that got fixed when my mother came over and started force-feeding me. The symptoms that I did have were troubling. I had occasional cramping pains and some bleeding. I always rushed to my doctor with this, especially the bleeding. After looking for clues long and hard he determined that it was probably a low-lying placenta. Now if you google that, you will see that it simply means that one placenta is lying on or very close to the cervix. I was accordingly asked to avoid a whole slew of activities: exercise (my walks in the park), impact (my bus ride to work) and intercourse (duhh!). One time the bleeding was so severe I had to rush off to the ER, where after dilly-dallying for five hours, the doctor concluded that it was probably a low-lying placenta (duhh again!).

But for the most part, Animesh and I didn't have to change our lives in any remarkable way. I had to change my wardrobe, because I quickly outgrew my previously skinny style. Happily, empire waist tops and rustic skirts were all the rage this summer, so for the longest time I could cover my impending motherhood without shopping in the maternity section. Designers for maternity wear have the fashion sense of a doormat, unfortunately, and if I ever decide to quit my day job and go solo, I think I will become a maternity designer and become wildly successful despite having no evident talent for it. But I digress. Animesh and I did talk a lot about moving to a bigger apartment. Everyone I know has heard my woes about my tiny apartment in NYC. Well it will NOT accommodate another two habitants, even if they are bed-bound newborn babes. Our apartment hunt was cut short, however, when the doctor forbade me 'from even THINKING about moving. Are you CRAZY! You are a high-risk case! NO! NO moving ANYWHERE till the babies are out!!' I might mention here that my doctor was talking in all caps because he is part French and therefore an emotional sort. So we decided to move soon after the babies were born, in the peak of winter, in NYC. I'm not sure how we thought we would pull that off, but at that time we didn't care. We were busy admiring the growing collage on the back of my wardrobe door where we had stuck the ultrasound photos of our precious babies 'a' and 'b'.

At 17 weeks we found out that baby-A might be boy. We also scheduled a detail sonogram at the hospital for the later. At 18 weeks I started noticing shooting pains and strange vaginal discharge. Google said it was indicative of pre-term labor and that I should call my doctor immediately. My doctor said that it was leucorrhea and that it was normal and that it would likely increase during the course of my pregnancy. He thought the shooting pains were due to the uterus expanding to accommodate the twins. At 19 weeks, I noticed some blood in the discharge and went in to see the doctor. The ultrasound looked normal and the speculum exam revealed that the cervix was behaving itself. The next day, about 12 hours later, we were in the hospital for the detail sonogram. The nurse showed us how well kids were doing. ‘A’ was a boy and ‘B’ was a girl. They had strong heartbeats, were remarkably big and healthy for twins and had all the 19-week appropriate organs. I suppose doctors and nurses are trained to say nice things about your growing baby, but we felt so proud every time she said ‘Look at him moving like that!’ or ‘You can see her profile from this angle, look- she has the sweetest face’. We asked the nurse to double check the cervix to see if there were any abnormalities, and that’s when the show went bad. She did a vaginal ultrasound and rushed out to call the doctor. The resident looked upset, went out, made calls to my OB, looked at the ultrasound again and finally told us that the cervix was short. That I would have to go up to Labor and Delivery and a high-risk doctor would try to help us.

In Labor and Delivery we waited for an eternity before the high-risk doctor stopped by. Apparently my cervix was dilating, and the membranes from the uterus were beginning to fall out. The doctor wanted me to be moved downstairs (to ante-natal care… and I still don’t know what they do) and be placed in a tilted bed (with my head lower than my feet) in the hopes that the membranes would go back in. Once that happened, they could conceivably put in a cervical cerclage, which is a procedure in which a stitch is placed all around the cervix and pulled to seal it shut. We were asked to make the decision about whether or not to put in the cerclage. You would think that the answer is an obvious ‘Yes’, but its not. We were told that putting the cerclage in was iffy at best, and that it would probably only give our kids another 3-4 weeks. At that time they would be just short of 24 weeks. Babies born at 24 weeks are likely to suffer severe mental and physical disabilities, pulmonary disorders and other ailments. In my doctor’s words, ‘at 24 weeks the child has a 50% chance of making it alive. But will he go to high school, to college? Probably not! Will he be able to take care of himself? Probably not! Will you need to provide special care? Probably. And that’s if the baby survives. I’m sorry, it’s a tough choice, but you have to decide if you want to put in a cerclage and wait, or end it and start over’. That was the decision we had to make. We had just walked into the hospital that morning to find out that the kids were doing great and that we were going to have a boy and a girl. I was numb. My family and Animesh’s were insistent that we be positive and strong: ‘don’t worry about the odds, be strong, be positive. Don’t give them up!’ But we did consider the odds. There in the antenatal unit, Animesh and I tried to decide what we wanted to do. Could we be good parents to a severely disabled child? To two severely disabled children? Should we start over? I hate that we had those thoughts, but we did. And we can’t take them back.

Eventually the decision wasn’t ours. I started bleeding and the shooting pains I was feeling periodically became more frequent. They were contractions. At night my water broke. The resident took another ultrasound; both babies were still alive and moving. Baby B’s placenta was intact, Baby A’s had ruptured. The doctor recommended inducing labor. They said I could have pain meds of my choice: Morphine, to reduce the pain and dull awareness, or epidural, to eliminate pain and maintain awareness. I chose morphine. I went into labor within 20-30 minutes of being medicated. The morphine was not administered till later, and then it merely dulled the pain slightly… I felt them come out. They came out together. By 6pm, Saturday, July 9th, I was all done.

A nurse asked me if I wanted to see them before they were taken to the morgue. I did. She brought them over in a little cart. We named the boy Aroo and the girl Pari. At 6 and 6.5 oz they looked like porcelain dolls. Aroo had a beet red face, like he was frowning. His little eyes were framed with dark eyebrows. I think he looked a little like my brother. Pari was much paler. And she had one of those perma-smiles on her face that you see on Animesh. She looked so delicate, I was afraid to touch. We kissed them both. The nurse covered the cart and took them away (she was afraid the other mother’s-to-be would see them and get distressed). She left me a little silk box with some fuzzy pictures of Aroo and Pari, their footprints on paper, the little hats they had been wearing when we saw them, and a little card that read:

When someone comes into our lives…

And they are too quietly and quickly gone,

They leave footprints on our hearts…

And their memory stays with us forever.

I feel so empty and so angry that I only have a little box with pictures and footprints by the way of a memory. That I didn’t know them at all. They didn’t cry, or ask for things or make a fuss. They just quietly left. And I don’t know anything about them except that they were both beautiful, and very strong. I was so full of morphine that night that I forgot to say I love you. So I want to say I love you now. To Aroo and Pari, my darlings. You made me so proud. Every night, for those five months, I dreamt about all the fun things I would do with you. I still think about them sometimes and I have to remind myself that you are not coming back. You are always in my thoughts. Be happy and take care of each other.

Later that night, another nurse came to check on me. We were talking about babies and things, and I started telling her about them. How their heartbeat had been so strong, and their weight so perfect. How they had been moving about till the end. A totally anonymous night nurse I would probably never see again and who sees tens of pregnant women everyday, and I was slipping in silly details that made me feel proud. I'm not sure she understood. She told me it was good to grieve. That she was happy to keep me company if I wanted to talk some more. She suggested I contact bereavement services the next day. Then before she left for the night, she turned to Animesh and said ‘Good night, Daddy’.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dear Dimpi,
I am shattered once again after reading your account in the Blog. We are so much poorer for not being able to be a part of the world of Aroo and Pari.
Dimpi-sona, I wish you were with us today so that we could talk for hours about the angels, who became part of you, alas for too short a time.
I don’t have words, I don’t know what to write, what I shall tell Animesh and you to console or comfort . I have seen both of you so happy and expectant, how suddenly the things changed ?
With lots of love,
Yours Daddy

11:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dimp and Anni,
your little angels have left big footprints in our hearts. They will always be with you; and you with them, wherever they are.
The pain of losing them is unbearable.... don't know what to say but that we are all grieving with you that we were not given a chance to get to know Pari and Aroo.
love,
sangita and arun

3:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nayantara,
Not to ignore Animesh, but I want to say to you that you are a very strong woman. I know that your pain is great and your loss even greater. My heart is overflowing with so much emotion that it has now turned to tears. Tears for your pain and also for your strength. There is no doubt in my mind that your little angels felt your love for them. It's hard to find the right words of comfort for you and Animesh. Just know that if ever you need me, I am here.

--YC

2:09 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home