My Favorite Day (Date)

Here's a recycled post for Sunday Scribblings:

Michelle over at Scribbit is hosting a December Write-away contest and I decided to write-along.



I have a lot of favorite days but one that clearly stands out in my mind is the day that my whole family was reunited after months of separation. Friends, family and old blogging friends will know exactly what I'm talking about, and I apologize up front because sometimes I feel like I'm playing the same old tune, but I think one has to experience what I went through to appreciate that 2 years later, the memories are still fresh, sometimes raw even in my mind.



One of the worst days of my life led to one of the best days of my life, and for that dichotomy, that stark discovery from dark and light, I'm thankful. That bleak day began with excited plans for a full anatomy scan of the baby I was carrying with a Maternal Fetal Medicine Specialist. I had nagging feelings that something wasn't right, but I was optimistic just the same that we'd find out the sex of the baby and feel confident in our decision to move to a new state THAT WEEK with a slight lapse in medical insurance coverage. Our life was packed, a house purchased, and we were ready to go. And then the appointment happened. The Ultra sound technician put the conducting gel on my stomach, added the wand, and viola! I saw a dismembered baby. To my horror it dawned on me that my baby had a stomach that was not attached to it's head. The technician was very surprised and kept looking at my notes. Nowhere on my referral file did it mention TWINS. Not the kind that are dismembered (it was two heads I saw, not a free floating stomach and head), but the kind that are so rare most people have never heard of them. So rare and high risk that they were only given a 50% chance of survival, and a whole treatment plan had to be set up including a prolonged hospitalization for the 3 of us.

Within weeks I was in the hospital. The babies heartrates were continuously monitored to make sure that if there was cord compression they could be taken, and the burden of carrying on with life without a wife and mother fell to my husband and family. I spent 10 weeks in the hospital, doing everything I could to bring home two babies if we were lucky. Babies that we knew would certainly be premature and have a rough start in life. Our family life together was the price we gratefully paid, but it wasn't easy.

When the babies were born on their scheduled date at 33 weeks gestation we were elated. When we found out that their cords were entertwined with 8 knots we were humbled. When we saw that they had signs of late onset of Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome there was no doubt that a miracle had happened in our lives.

The time they spent in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) was relatively short and blessedly uneventful, but it was a taxing time. Trying to heal from the C-Section, nurture the children that I hadn't lived with for 10 weeks, get back into a routine at home and go back and forth from the NICU was trying. The kids wanted to see the babies they had sacrificed for, and more than anything, we wanted the ordeal to be over and our family to be together.

My favorite day was when that happened. We bundled up our 2 little almost 5 lb. monoamniotic babies, said farewell to life in the hospital, brought them home, loved them up, and haven't looked back.