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My Life Between Poopie Diapers

Let's start by playing two truths and a lie:

1. I have fraternal twins 2. I had an easy pregnancy and delivery with no complications 3. I haven't gone this many days without wearing make-up since I first put on eye shadow freshman year of high school Well, since the subject of this blog is being the Mom of NICU babies, you've probably guessed that number two is the lie.

Being a Mom is hard, and being a NICU Mom is just a little bit harder, but being a NICU Mom of twins is hardest! I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, I love my children and I’m blessed that we are alive to talk about it today, but in the nine weeks they were in the NICU life literally changed forever. My life before I had children – working 18 hours a day in advertising, doing voiceovers as a hobby, going out to dinner with my husband and friends, getting my nails done once a week and running around the city to go shopping at sample sales – bears no resemblance to what my life looks like now.

We tried for over a year to get pregnant. I have CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome) stemming from a case of shingles where I didn’t get a rash so it was impossible to diagnose. The shingles resulted in PHN (Post Herpetic Neuralgia) where you feel the pain of the rash long after it disappears (or in my case for a prolonged period of time). I had been suffering from CRPS for over a year before I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. The combination of my pain disorders and a diagnosis of PCOS (Polycystic Ovaries) led my Gynecologist to recommend that, a fertility doctor should see us right out of the gate.

Fertility issues are very lonely.

In a room filled with women, all suffering from the same thing, the inability to conceive, there isn’t much communication. Also, I didn’t have any friends – at least that I knew of – that had had issues conceiving. It’s weird but no one discusses it. Even when I’ve spoken with friends who I know have undergone fertility treatments they don’t really discuss how they conceived. Look, I’m an open book, and to a greater or lesser extent I speak about anything in my life.

So let me tell you – my husband, Jeff, and I tried for many months to use the hormone, clomid, to conceive, and every month it failed. We went through one round of Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) and when that didn’t stick either, my doctor got us approved for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF).

We went through two rounds of IVF, implanting two embryos both times. If you’ve never done IVF let me tell you that it is not fun. You have to inject yourself with so many drugs, that you actually have to take a two-hour class to learn about all the injectables and how you need to use each one! We were lucky and the doctor was able to harvest 11 eggs. From there 8 of the eggs, fertilized with Jeff’s sperm developed into embryos.

After the first round of implantation we were pregnant with one baby and we were over the moon! Unfortunately, in my ninth week during a routine check-up they heard no fetal heartbeat and determined that the fetus had died. It was an emotional rollercoaster and even though I am blessed now with my twins, I still think about the baby we lost.

Six weeks later we were allowed to try again and after implantation we learned that we were pregnant with twins!

Pregnancy pretty much sucks – I’ll just say it. It’s gross – you fart a lot – and it’s really uncomfortable. For me I was nauseous all the time and from the minute I became pregnant until the minute I gave birth I had a migraine that would get better or worse depending on the weather.

If you live in NYC you’ll remember “SnoreEaster” the blizzard that ended up not being as bad as the weather men thought it was going to be, but the whole city prepared for the worst. About a week before that Monday I started to get ocular migraines – which means that I would get blurry vision in one of my eyes, for me the left, for a few seconds to a few minutes. Then I started to throw up. I called my OB and he wasn’t too concerned, since I had always had migraines. He told me to call my neurologist. I spoke to the neurologist and he couldn’t see me until Tuesday. Then because of the storm he said come down on Monday, the day the storm was starting, because the city was going to be closed on Tuesday.

I was tired, and admittedly a bit lazy, and I told him it wasn’t a big deal and I would come in a few days after the storm. Then it happened again. And like any good hypochondriac I decided to Google my symptoms. 99% of the time I would not recommend Googling symptoms – you end up thinking you have stomach cancer when you really have indigestion. But in this case, it saved my life.

I found out that my symptoms all fell under preeclampsia and I knew from Downtown Abby (J since Lady Sybil died from preeclampsia) that that was potentially deadly.

A direct quote from the Mayo Clinic “Left untreated, preeclampsia can lead to serious — even fatal — complications for both you and your baby. If you have preeclampsia, the only cure is delivery of your baby.”

And to my unhappiness that’s exactly what happened.

L-o-n-g story very short, I started out at one hospital and they didn’t think I had very serious preeclampsia and said I may be able to wait as long at 10 days before I delivered (under doctor supervision of course). However, when I got transferred to Mount Sinai, where my OB was affiliated, they had a different impression. Since preeclampsia is determined based on a few symptoms and there’s no definitive test to say yay or nay, it all depends on the doctor looking at the severity. The high-risk doctor at Mount Sinai saved my life. After his consultation my OB and he decided that I had sever preeclampsia and that I needed to be delivered the next morning.

Thankfully I had already had the steroid injections at the first hospital that the babies needed for their lungs to quickly develop and so at that point they started me on magnesium, which is needed for the brain to develop quickly.

After that every started to happen at the speed of light. Within nine hours I was the mother of twins and my NICU adventure began.

#preemie #twinsmom #nicumom #twins #factortwins