Saturday, January 17, 2015

my bump journey


How precious Saturday mornings have become.

The working week is over, and I survived. It's 3:34pm and I'm still in my pyjamas, but I intend to remain that way until I go out tonight.

My little boy has decided to refuse all food. He is either teething really badly (likely - he has every, single symptom and hasn't got any teeth yet), or he is traumatised by the fact his life has been turned upside down and to control the situation, has stopped eating. I was warned this might happen. It's heartbreaking.

His little fat leg doughnuts have shrunk considerably, almost to nothing - he is skinny again. It's crazy how quickly this happens to babies. Why can't this happen to me?

It's been 10 months, and it hurts to look at these pictures sometimes, but I finally got round to putting together a collage of my bump when I was pregnant.

The Brit took one of my bump every week, every Monday night. From 9 weeks until I was induced at 36 weeks.
The big milestones for me were:

9 weeks: I felt so sick, I remember struggling not to projectile vom over my fellow tube commuters in the morning. And the tiredness was ridiculous, I felt like I would pass out on the spot every afternoon, so I'd need to get up from my desk and walk around the building - aimlessly - just to stay upright.

12 weeks: You can tell everyone, as the most 'risky' stage of pregnancy is over (not with twins, it turns out.) But the morning sickness and tiredness start to go away and you feel 8 000 times better.

15 weeks: I was starting to show (That or they must've been like "Wow. She's really packed it on, hasn't she?), so I told work. I had to hide it the week before when I was with my colleagues in San Francisco at a conference. Where we usually all booze. That was hard. Pretending to booze is hard work.

19 weeks: I suddenly started to get big. Beeg. You could now tell I wasn't carrying a singleton, or many would've assumed I was onto my third child.

20 weeks: The best scan. They didn't look like shrimps anymore, they had arms and legs and were moving and waving and doing funny things like kick each other. Everything looked healthy and normal. We asked not to know the sexes, although I just knew it was a boy and a girl.

27 weeks: I was sizeable, so we thought we'd better go on a babymoon before I couldn't walk properly/actually enjoy it. I was sore, being kicked everywhere, and generally life was getting pretty uncomfortable. I was guzzling bottles of Gaviscon. We still drove to France and had a few days there. Mainly eating.

30 weeks: This was the last scan where I saw Molly alive. By now they were large enough that I couldn't see their whole bodies anymore, only pieces of who they were - heads, chests, hands. All was still normal and healthy, even though Molly (Twin 2) was the smaller twin.

31 weeks: Commuting was becoming the ultimate ball ache, walking was hard work, I was huffing and puffing and generally, pretty miserable to be honest. Everyone else who was pregnant and at the same timeline as me, had neat, compact little bumps and they all seemed very spritely. My bump was heavy and weighing me down. It was time to leave work.

32 weeks: I spent most days propped up by a fortress of cushions on my bed, not lying fat or they'd surely suffocate me, but not sitting upright either.
Molly, up until this point, was breech. They'd been lying yin and yang for all this time, and so they booked me in to have a c-section at 37 weeks and 5 days, on 4 April.

However, she suddenly decided to turn, and in the bath one night, I saw and felt it. It was like something out of Alien.
They estimated that this was the week Molly stopped growing. So when she was born, she was the size of a 32 week baby.

34 weeks: It was sometime between now and 35 weeks that she gave up the fight and died. I didn't notice that she wasn't kicking, as she was always a graceful little thing. She didn't kick the hell out of me directly in my ribs like Sebastian did (he was a boy from day 1. No question about it), she kind of fluttered. She would flutter, it felt like butterflies.

35 weeks: I went in for my final scan, and they confirmed that she had no heartbeat.
I stayed in hospital for a week to have Sebastian monitored.

36 weeks: I was induced. I was in labour for 18 hours, right up until the point where Sebastian got stuck and so I had an emergency c-section.

This was my twin journey.

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