I started feeling really tired towards the end of April 2007,. I used to get home from work, flop on the sofa and just about managed to keep my eyes open for long enough to watch a bit of telly and have a bite to eat before I went to bed at around 9-9.30pm. We had already booked a week away in the Cotswolds at the start of May, so I hoped that I would still be feeling ok by then.
Unfortunately, the morning sickness really kicked in on the first day of our holiday, when I was 8 weeks pregnant. We stopped at a service station on the way and dh decided that he really wanted a KFC meal. I’m not hugely fond of KFC but I thought sod it. I’m pregnant so I may as well enjoy myself. I think that was the source of my aversion to chicken throughout the rest of my pregnancy. I couldn’t look at it, touch it, smell it or taste it without feeling nauseous. Our hotel did amazing cooked breakfasts, with fried bread and all the trimmings. They didn’t look quite as great spattered around the toilet in our room. I started the week with a fry up and ended it pushing a small morsel of toast around my plate, which I inevitably saw again approximately 10 minutes later. Let’s just say it wasn’t the best holiday I’ve ever had.
The end of May and most of June 2007 are a bit of a blur. I spent most of the time lying prone on the sofa at home. I watched an awful lot of cricket. By this time, the only foods I could keep down for any length of time were chocolate chip cookies and ice pops. My first scan was booked for 11th June. The week before, exhausted and nauseous after another day of my body rejecting everything I threw at it I broke down and sobbed on dh’s shoulder. I felt like I was being punished for getting pregnant so easily. I knew that it would be hard. I didn’t know it would be this hard.
11th June. Nuchal scan day. I started my day in my now customary fashion of puking up the glass of water I had dared to allow into my body. I threw up all over myself on the bus on the way to the hospital. We were the first patients of the day and were actually seen at our allotted time. The sonographer ran through the usual questions: first pregnancy, no miscarriages, age, general health, etc. The scan began and I looked at the screen, praying that there would actually be a baby in my stomach. There was definitely something in there. I saw two oval blobs on the screen and decided my baby had a big arse. Then the sonographer spoke: “It’s a twin pregnancy”. “W-what?” I stammered. “It’s a twin pregnancy, two babies”.
The events of the last few weeks started to make more sense. I’d got a positive test so quickly, a sure sign of the high hormone levels associated with twins. I’d been as sick as a dog. I could barely drag myself out of bed in the morning. I had peed for England. My boobs entered the room 10 minutes before I did. All of these symptoms pointed towards a multiple pregnancy and they were right. We went through the full range of emotions: fear, sadness, excitement and hysteria before reality set in. A couple of months previously, we didn’t know if we were able to have one baby. Now I seemed to be doing a sterling job of cooking two.
I thought the sickness would abate after the magic 12 week mark, but it didn’t. Towards the end of June, after enduring another week of having to get off the tube to be sick on my way to work, I made an appointment with my GP. She weighed me (I had lost half a stone and I was still wearing jeans and trainers when I stepped on the scales) and performed a full MOT. “You’ve got a choice. You can either carry on as you are, making yourself go into work and being ill and you’ll end up on a drip in hospital. Alternatively, I can sign you off for two weeks”. I argued with her and she signed me off for a week. Guess what? The following week I had to go back to get signed off for a further week.
Some proper time off gave me a chance to assess things with a (slightly) clearer head. I knew that even if I managed to get though a train journey without throwing up, I could barely function when I was at work. I asked if I could work at home a couple of days a week and my flexible working request was granted. I returned to work in July and although I didn’t feel 100%, I could at least get through the day. The sickness finally eased when I was 18 weeks pregnant. Gradually, I started fancying food again. I went through a phase of craving lamb and mint crisps, which were extremely hard to get hold of. I even managed to go out for lunch without wanting to throw up over my plate afterwards.
By early August, I started to ‘enjoy’ being pregnant. I had a small, neat bump. I wanted to eat. I felt like being sociable again. The countdown to the 22 week anomaly scan was unbearable. Dh and I had decided that we HAD to know the sexes of the babies. We had been told that they were non-identical, which opened up all gender combinations. The idea of boy and girl twins appealed, although we trotted out the ‘as long as they’re healthy’ line to anyone that asked. I had bought a baby names book very early on and dh and I had spent quite a long time ‘conversing’ (or arguing) over names. We agreed on boys names relatively easily. I chose Thomas and dh chose Lewis, which meant that boy twins were sorted. Boy & girl twins would be Ruth (dh’s choice) and Thomas (Tom). However, girls names were a different story. Dh HATED every name I suggested. Freya? No. Jennifer? No. Sophie? No. Harriet? No. Grace? No. I eventually won him round (or ground him down) on Grace and he persuaded me that Ruth was a good name.
17 August 2007 – 22 week anomaly scan. Two sonographers (the perks of twins!) assessed the two perfectly healthy babies/aliens that had invaded my body and taken over in the last five months. The sonographer had a careful look at the screen: “Twin 2 looks like a little girl”. “Yep, definitely a girl” his colleague agreed. “Twin 1 is another little girl”. I looked at dh’s face. He had gone white. I knew that he really wanted one of the babies to be a boy. I expected to feel a little disappointed but instead I felt elated. I was sent off to the loo to empty my bladder for an internal (it’s all glamour) and found myself whooping with joy and leaping up and down with a big grin on my face in the confined space of the cubicle. I had MY girls!! Poor dh was going to be totally outnumbered... I hoped and prayed they wouldn’t look too much like Ugly Betty when they emerged in a few months’ time.
Twin 1 and Twin 2 immediately became Grace and Ruth respectively. As we reached the end of August and entered September, I felt ‘properly’ pregnant. There was no mistaking my bump now. Woe betide anyone that didn’t offer me a seat on the tube! We attended a wedding and a 30th birthday party on consecutive nights and I bought a new dress to show off my burgeoning bump. I managed to waddle around the dance floor to Crazy in Love by Beyonce (my friends shook their asses, I wibbled my bump) and dh attempted to slow-dance with me but couldn’t make his hands meet around my back. His friends laughed like drains and took pictures, buggers!
My pregnancy was going swimmingly, aside from that fact that I was getting absolutely massive. Well, my bump was. From the back I didn’t look pregnant at all. Then I turned round and blocked the sun out! Towards the end of September, I started to feel unwell. I’d had a sniffle throughout my pregnancy but now I had a full-on virus.
One evening, I noticed that the underside of my bump felt a little sore. I decided that I had clearly overdone things and had an early night. Next morning, I was in agony. I phoned the hospital for advice and was told to go straight in for monitoring. The lovely ladies at the fetal assessment until hooked me up to the monitors, tested my wee and said that they thought I had a urine infection. They flagged down a doctor and asked him to perform and internal. My cervix was not happy and I writhed around in agony as they attempted to insert a speculum. The diagnosis was confirmed and I was sent home with some antibiotics. As soon as I got home, I went to the loo. There was blood. Shit. Another phone call and another visit to the hospital. They made sure that the babies were fine, which they were and I was sent home again.
Next day, I woke up in even more pain. I couldn’t get comfortable all and was screaming in agony. All I wanted to do was drink water. I went to the loo and before I could sit down, water gushed everywhere. I honestly thought my waters had broken. Dh rushed my to the hospital and I spent the whole journey thinking “I’m 27 weeks. My babies aren’t ready yet. I’m not ready yet”. The hospital was absolutely manic so I was put in the delivery suite waiting room. Every few minutes I stood up, bent over and howled in agony. I had never experienced such excruciating pain in my whole life. After what seemed like an eternity, I was given a bed on the delivery suite ward. I was assessed by the doctor who said that I needed stronger antibiotics and would need a scan to see if the babies were ok. He turned to leave and experienced another shooting pain in my bump. I screamed in pain. He muttered something to the nurse about drugs and I was given something that didn’t really help. The nurse was duly dispatched (to the back streets of Woolwich, presumably) to find something stronger and I was given something that gave me a whole range of rather interesting hallucinogenic experiences. I don’t really remember but apparently I thought it would be absolutely hilarious to use my sick bowl as a hat. I had a dream that it would be brilliant to spray paint a whole load of foam blocks silver and stick them to the walls of our new house. Thankfully, the scan revealed that the babies were unharmed and my waters hadn’t broken. Apparently the infection had spread to my kidneys and needed to be treated aggressively. I was hooked up to two drips: one with a hideously strong antibiotic in and one with saline solution. I was given a private room to recuperate in (presumably because I had frightened the other patients so much that they didn’t want to put me on a ward) and stayed in hospital for two days. I demanded to hear my babies’ heartbeats every few hours (they weren’t going to argue with me) and became addicted to the galloping noise. I nearly smuggled a Doppler machine out when I left.
The infection cleared up just in time for me to return to work for my last week before I went on maternity leave. Although I didn’t feel sick any more the physical effort of getting to work and back home again was becoming too much. I took three weeks of annual leave at 29 weeks and started maternity leave when I was 32 weeks pregnant. During this time we moved house. This is very much the royal ‘we’ – dh did the hard work, I assumed the role of director of operations.
I spent most of October ‘helping’ with the unpacking (i.e. pointing and shouting a lot), doing bits of pieces for the house and shopping for furniture. I got increasingly angry in November when it became abundantly clear that I wasn’t going to have my babies any time soon. I wrote a lot of e-mails. I did some cross-stitch. I did my Chartership. The babies decided they liked performing disco moves at 3am. I started needing to pee all the time (again). I started sleeping in two shifts. My bump got heavier and heavier. I noticed that my stretch marks got redder and longer with every passing week. The babies disco danced so much that they moved from breech to transverse back to breech again. I took a lot of long baths and wallowed like a grazing hippo. I nearly lamped my consultant when he booked me for a section at 39 weeks. I became unable to leave the house without an escort. People started pointing and gawping at me in the street. I had to fend off bump fondlers. My feet swelled up in the morning and ballooned unattractively all day. I looked like a hobbit without the hair. Dh had to put my trainers on for me. I did everything I could to get these little monsters growing inside me to move out. They weren’t having any of it.
At my pre-op appointment on 5 December I was weighed for the first time since June. I had put on two and a half stone – three stone if you include the half a stone I lost during the sickness phase. Five minutes after I received this news I achieved the only slightly worrying blood pressure result of my entire pregnancy. Other than that I’m proud to say I was a 120 over 60 girl throughout.
I don’t recall what I did on my last weekend of ‘freedom’ My ‘sent items’ folder of my e-mails tells me that I sent an email on 6th December and didn’t send another one until the 15th. My Facebook page tells a similar story. I asked dh if he remembered what we did: “You were very grumpy”. I pressed him for more information. “You sat on the sofa, watched Frasier DVDs and did your cross-stitch. Oh and you were unbelievably grumpy”.
It became abundantly clear that I wasn’t going to get an early release from my pregnancy agonies. These little buggers had obviously heard about the section date at 39 weeks (39 WEEKS!) and were determined to hold station until then. I had visions of two little Swampy types clinging on to my uterus for dear life.
I spent the last few days of my pregnancy going backwards and forwards to the hospital for monitoring. I had started to get incredibly itchy and they wanted to ensure that I didn’t have a liver problem. I got to know the ladies at the FAU so well that they started chatting to the girls by name as they monitored them: “Now come on Ruth, stop hitting the pads and let me get a reading”. “How is young Grace this morning?”.
As fun as this was, I had had enough. The night before my section (dh took the incredibly sensible decision to work and stay out of my way) I spoke to my Mum and sister. I told them that I felt a curious mixture of excitement and fear – it was a bit like the joy of Christmas Eve combined with a good dollop of the terror I experienced the night before I received my A-Level results. I took the pre-op tablets and tried and failed desperately to get a good night’s sleep. No chance.
