When I went for my first ultrasound at 7 weeks, the tech could only see a yolk sac measuring 5 weeks. At first they suspected a blighted ovum, or maybe my dates were wrong. I went back three nerve-wracking weeks later, when I should have been 10 weeks pregnant.
Instead of no baby, there were two. I was awestruck, excited, and a whole lot of terrified. We already had a one-year-old, and I was worried about what this would mean for him and for us. But it was twins. How many people get to do that? The babies were still only measuring 8 weeks, so we adjusted my dates and started planning our new future.
Two weeks later, just shy of 10 weeks (or 12—I still don’t know which dates are right),
I went to the bathroom in the morning and saw blood. We were on vacation four hours away from home, so we cut our trip short to make sure everything was okay. I waited in the ER for three hours. In that time, my discomfort turned into cramping and back pain. I began to gush blood just as the nurse called my name.
Moments after we got into a room, all hell broke loose. I saw my children fall out of me and land on the floor. The bleeding wouldn’t stop. The room looked like it belonged to a gunshot victim. The doctors kept going back in to retrieve tissue in an attempt to make the bleeding stop, but it just kept going. I needed two units of blood transfused. I hear there were worse parts, but I was unconscious for those.
And through all of it, I alternated between sobbing, apologizing to my husband and to the trauma team for putting them through this, and making wildly inappropriate jokes. At one point I whispered to my husband that I had to do it; I needed to distract myself from the horror and break just a little bit of the awful tension that hung in the air.
Around midnight, when I was stable and they’d done an ultrasound to confirm that my babies were gone, my husband and I were left alone in the trauma room. They kept me overnight to make sure I wouldn’t take another turn for the worse. I slept for a few hours, woke up at 5, remembered why I was there, and cried.
Only 12 hours after it all began, I went home without my babies, wearing someone else’s clothes, and without any idea what to do next.
Waiting on Sunrise 