Born (Third of Three)
I remember very little else from the operating room after they were born. I think I probably asked how much they weighed. I remember pictures being taken. One of the nurses standing by Baby A’s warming station called out “Can I get someone from the NICU over here, please?” And then, without missing a beat, she added, “Just for an extra pair of hands?” I realize now that second comment was thrown in to keep me from panicking, and it worked – I had no idea until much later that poor Baby A was awarded a whopping 3 (out of 10) on his one-minute Apgar score. (He was up to a 9 by five minutes – thank you, outstanding medical personnel!) In what seemed like no time at all, Matt and the babies and their staffs were all being bustled out of the room to recovery, and suddenly no one was paying much attention to me anymore. The surgical team was chatting with each other, and the nurses who’d been so nice to me earlier had left with the babies. My only company was the dull-as-dishwater anesthesiologist, who clearly felt he was getting a raw deal by not being allowed to knock me out completely. I had been terrified of this exact scenario when imagining the c-section, but in the moment it didn’t matter at all. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that we had a boy and a girl. After months of being so certain that they were both boys, I was overcome with the surprise of my little girl (and to this day I still have this strange feeling that someone is going to come and tell me that there was a mistake, and that she’s not actually mine, or not actually a girl – the latter possibility seeming less and less likely with each diaper change). While I honestly didn’t have a particularly strong preference about the babies’ sexes as I was wheeled into the OR, by the time I was wheeled out I have to admit that I felt incredibly, indescribably fortunate to have both a daughter and a son (words that still sound crazy and wonderful to me).
I lay there as they stitched me up and mused on the fact that we now knew their names, including the fact that they would have Matt’s last name (we’d agreed ahead of time that if the twins had been two of the same sex, they’d have my last name, and if they were one of each sex they’d have his last name – sort of a built-in coin flip). The OB showed me their placentas, which I know some people will think is gross, but I wanted to see these amazing, disposable organs that I’d grown and that my body had used to nourish my babies for months and months. (They looked exactly like you’d expect: jiggly, bloody lumps. Still.) I consulted with my delightful anesthesiologist about a very strong pain in my left upper arm, and he comfortingly told me that it was probably referred pain from my uterus being outside of my body and resting on my leg. (Right around this time I also noticed that if I looked directly at the overhead light, I could see a (blessedly) fragmented reflection of what was going on on the other side of the curtain below – ack! It looked a lot like Matt’s diagram.)
Finally, finally it was time for me to join Matt and the babies in the recovery room. We took turns holding our children and getting to know them. It’s funny; a few days before they were born I mused to Matt that I expected that for the first few days or weeks I would probably think of the babies as a unit – “the twins” – and only later really start to differentiate between them as I got to know them as individuals. Apparently I expected to have the most generic babies in the world. In fact, they were unique little people full of their own personalities right from the beginning. It was the first of the many surprises that motherhood has brought me so far.
Matt and I spent the next four days in the hospital, in a room with a large picture window looking out over divine Providence (and the hospital parking lot). We got about six hours of sleep in the first 60 hours. Julian and Eloise were born just in time to watch the Red Sox play their last game of the 2008 postseason and, slightly later, to see the first black man elected president of the United States. I feel exceedingly lucky that I get to devote the next several years to witnessing what else their lives have in store for them. At least until they’re teenagers and they start telling me to butt out.
Today is actually my official due date. No one ever expected me to go 40 weeks with twins, of course, but it’s still the date I used throughout pregnancy — usually with a “twins” caveat — at my OB’s office and whenever anyone asked. Just three weeks and a day later, it is impossible for me to grasp that with a different pregnancy I might only now be giving birth. For all that I have failed to capture the magnitude and significance of my children’s arrival, I would have an even harder time putting into words the wonder and terror of our lives since, so I won’t even try. I want to try, because I already feel a crushing nostalgia for this time, which is going so fast. I don’t want to forget a moment of it, but I’m sure that written down it would sound like nothing but a dull recounting of clipping tiny fingernails and watching tiny chests rise and fall in sleep. Okay, on second thought, that actually sounds like a pretty terrific read to this smitten mother.
(But don’t worry, I won’t subject you all to it. You’re heroes for having made it even this far.)
Filed under Parenting, Pregnancy | Tags: birth | Comments (9)Born (Second of Three)
This is not a high-drama birth story. Everything went exactly as expected. In fact, there is nothing interesting about it to outsiders, but for me it was possibly the most intense few hours of my life to date.
Matt and I packed the last few things we needed and were probably in the car within 15 minutes. I noted that we’d missed the full moon by a few days and hoped that that meant that the hospital wouldn’t be too busy.
When we arrived, we did some fairly brief paperwork in triage (ooohh, paperwork! I warned you: not high drama), and then I was taken into a small room where they listened to the babies’ heartbeats with a Doppler, took my blood pressure, and asked if I was a victim of domestic violence. Then Matt and I sat in the nearly empty waiting room (turns out that 2 a.m. on a Sunday is a good time to have the hospital to yourself) for a few minutes before being taken into a fancier room where they hooked me up to a monitor and – lo and behold! I was having contractions! Cool! I could sort of feel them, and I even had one that could be called fairly uncomfortable. I felt as though I had been given a tiny consolation prize for not getting to experience labor: one semi-painful contraction. Woo! Even better, the obstetric resident came in and announced that I was 3 centimeters dilated. I was actually pretty happy that my body was getting a few cues that the pregnancy was coming to an end rather than just having the babies removed without any notice at all.
I don’t remember much else from that room except Matt becoming faint as the nurse placed my IV very inexpertly (that turned out to be the most painful pre-surgery moment) and doing a fair amount of sitting around and watching our babies’ heartbeats on the monitor. What felt like hours later (yet also sooner than I could believe), I was being wheeled to the operating room.
This is when they cruelly separated me from Matt. I took my midwife’s advice to an extreme and told everyone who would listen how scared I was, and this actually garnered me a fair amount of kindness from the nurses as I waited for my spinal block. To receive the block, you lie down on your side in the fetal position, as curled up as you can possibly get, while they administer the anesthesia, and the nice thing about this is that the fetal position is pretty much the position you feel like lying in at this point anyway. It wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as I expected, and the next thing I knew I was being helped onto my back and my legs were getting numb.
Oh boy, this is really where things get fuzzy, so rather than trying to describe the chronology, I will just tell you the moments I remember: Matt coming back in; being asked whether I could feel pain with various pokes (I took those questions extremely seriously and thought hard before answering, given that I knew that they would be followed by some serious slicing and dicing); feeling lots and lots and lots of tugging and asking if the baby was out yet, and then hearing the OB announce that we had a little boy. Oh man, I get teary just thinking about that moment. My Baby A! He was real, he was here, and he was a little boy! The only thing better was hearing the OB announce one minute later that we also had a little girl – not because I so desperately preferred a girl to a boy, but because the enormity of it all just washed over me: we had two children. Our family suddenly complete, its configuration finally known to me. A boy and a girl. One of each. I couldn’t believe it.
Filed under Getting Pregnant, Parenting | Tags: birth | Comments (3)Born (First of Three)
Hey, it’s me! Rachel! The other parent, the one who can’t detach from the breast pump long enough to type more than a sentence at a time! Hence the long delay in my writing up the story of the twins’ birth from my point of view. It’s not as funny as Matt’s version, and in all honesty not as much fun to read (on the plus side, it’s incredibly long), but it’s a reflection of how I experienced the event.
As regular readers of this blog know, because the twins were stubbornly breech for months and months, we had no choice but schedule a c-section. Sunday, October 26 – at a gestational age of 37 weeks and 6 days – was to be The Day, and as I had had essentially no contractions or any signs of pre-term labor the entire pregnancy, it looked like we’d make it there.
It took me a little while to come to terms with the inevitability of the c-section – I had really been holding out hope for a vaginal delivery in spite of the rather shoddy odds. However, my pregnancy taught me stark lessons about adjusting to the unexpected (starting at week seven with news of its twinness), and I tried very hard to focus on the positives: I could have my own doctor and midwife in attendance, we had the luxury of making detailed plans for family visitors, and I would be able to get as much sleep as possible the couple days beforehand so I could go into the whole ordeal well rested.
I became so comfortable with this scenario that my brain wound up in denial about the possibility that the babies could come sooner. After weeks of protesting and procrastinating, I did finally pack the hospital bag on Saturday, October 18. Matt installed the car seats that day as well. And I mailed my absentee ballot (thank goodness – every vote really counted here in Rhode Island, you know).
After watching the Red Sox win game 5 of the ALCS around midnight that Saturday, Matt and I headed up to bed and I prepared for another night of fitful, uncomfortable sleep. When I got up for a standard bathroom trip at 2 a.m., it did not take me long to realize that something was very different (specifically, that my legs were all wet and the bathmats were suddenly in serious need of a wash). I sat in the bathroom allowing the reality of my water breaking to sink in, and I actually spent a moment wondering whether this really was IT, or whether this was the sort of thing I could maybe not mention to anyone for another week. Once common sense took over, I shakily called out to Matt that my water had broken. What I didn’t say out loud, but what I knew we were both grappling with, was the fact that we would probably have babies within a few hours. Boys or girls? Healthy? NICU? Big or small? The answers to all the questions we’d been pondering for months would be clear before the sun came up. I admit to being a little freaked out.
To be continued tomorrow…
Filed under Parenting, Pregnancy | Tags: birth | Comment (1)Unexpected
I did not expect the Red Sox to win Game 5 of the ALCS, so I certainly did not expect to be watching Game 6 until after midnight. And I definitely did not expect to be woken two hours after going to sleep by Rachel calling to me from the bathroom.
“Matt? I think my water broke.”
The predictable half-hour of frantic scrambling ensued. By a happy coincidence, we had spent the day Saturday packing our hospital bags and installing the car seats, “just in case.” In fact, I had confidently predicted to Rachel that by packing the bags in advance, we were ensuring that the babies would wait until their scheduled date to arrive. It’s the same theory that holds that by packing an umbrella for your vacation, you can guarantee that it won’t rain. I guess the principle doesn’t apply to babies.
So: bags, pillows, and an air mattress got thrown in the back of the car, food was hastily poured out for the cats, cameras and a laptop were stuffed in their bags, and off we went to the hospital.
The nice part about rushing to the hospital at 2:30 in the morning is that you get your choice of parking spaces, and there’s not much of a wait at triage. By 3:30 at the latest, we were in an exam room, Rachel was gowned up and on monitors, and the all of the preparations were underway. Rachel was pretty nervous, but I was able to keep myself upbeat and confident—until the nurse decided to put Rachel’s IV in the arm that I happened to be sitting next to and I nearly passed out. (Dramatic tension! if he can’t handle watching an IV go on, how will he manage in the operating room? Stay tuned!)
As mentioned previously, we were reasonably pleased to have the C-section scheduled because it meant that Rachel’s doctor would perform the surgery, and her midwife would attend to help keep us both calm and comfortable. (In fact, both of them planned to come in on their day off for us, which we can’t help but find flattering.) Coming in early meant that we got the doctor on call, who happened to be very nice, very professional, and very French Canadian. They also paged the midwife on call, but due to a communications breakdown somewhere along the line, the hospital staff forgot to wake her up from her nap to attend the surgery. I suppose if anyone was going to sleep through the surgery, a midwife we’d never met before was probably the best candidate.
After a seemingly interminable wait in the exam room, they finally wheeled Rachel up to the second floor and into the OR. This is the part Rachel (and I) were especially nervous about: neither of us liked the idea of being separated while she got on the operating table and had her spinal block. I’ll let Rachel relate the story from the woman’s perspective, but I can say that, from the male perspective, waiting to be called into the OR for your wife’s C-section will be the most boring and nerve-wracking fifteen minutes of your life.
Once they wheeled Rachel through the double doors, they handed me a bag of scrubs (size XXL) to pull on over my clothes, pointed me to towards one of two sad little chairs in the hallway, and told me to wait. I had time to experiment with self-portraiture:
After what seemed like hours, I was finally called into the OR. I had no idea what to expect, really, having never been in an operating room. What I saw was Rachel’s head poking out of a blue curtain, and two baby receiving stations just to her left. To her right was, essentially, the machine that goes “ping!” manned by her anesthesiologist—a man who had less personality than the aforementioned blue curtain. (He seemed like the kind of person who has never in his life been greeted with, “Hey! Good to see you!” I’m guessing he gets a lot of, “Oh. Hi, Bob.” The guy walked past be twice while I was waiting out in the hallway and was the only person out of more than a dozen not to congratulate me or, you know, acknowledge me sitting there in my oversized scrubs.)
Rachel was nervous, but brave. I was definitely holding it together, and was determined not to look over, past, or around that blue curtain, because very very gross things were going to be happening over there. My problem was this: I was told that as soon as the babies were out, I was free (and indeed encouraged) to go over to them, take pictures of them, and touch them. What complicated matters was that the room was laid out as follows:
Going over to Baby B was going to require edging past the curtain, making absolutely sure not to turn around, even for a second. After my misadventure in the exam room downstairs, I was determined not to screw this one up.
I sat down on the “dad” stool, the doctor started doing something behind the curtain, and less than ten minutes later, we heard Dr. Caron shout over the curtain, “I’m taking out Baby A! Do you want to know what it is?” Rachel and I replied in the affirmative, and the doctor sang out, “It’s a boy!” What seemed like a whole herd of blue-suited nurses sprang up around the Baby A table and before I could decide whether or not to get up off of my stool, Dr. Caron was telling us that the second baby was a girl.
(I didn’t care, much, what the sexes of our babies were, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was hoping for at least one girl. The more I think about it, the more it seems like we got absolutely the perfect combination.)
All in all, the “getting the babies out” portion of the event took maybe twenty minutes. Julian, Eloise, and I hung out for a few minutes, and then the three of us were ushered off to recovery to wait for Rachel to get stitched back together. So there I found myself, sitting in a warm, dark hospital room at six in the morning, staring at two helpless, pink, and crusty miniature persons. I did not expect to be doing that at all.
Filed under Parenting, Pregnancy | Tags: birth, c-section, hospital | Comments (7)Arrival
We are very excited to announce that our twins have decided to make an early entrance!
Julian Spaulding Harvey was born at 5:27 a.m, October 19. He weighed 4 pounds, 15 ounces. Julian is named in memory of his maternal great-grandfather, John Julien McCoy.
Eloise Spaulding Harvey was born at 5:28 a.m. She weighed 5 pounds, 1 ounce. Eloise is named in memory of her paternal grandmother, Lois Rappoport Harvey.
Rachel is recovering nicely, the twins are healthy, and we’re ecstatic, if a little stunned! We’ll be camped out at Women and Infants’ Hospital for a few days, but we’ll hopefully get some more pictures up soon. We look forward to introducing you to them!
