The discovery

After multiple losses and seven months of actively trying to conceive a sibling for my daughter, I was pretty anxious about my first OB appointment proceeding my latest positive pregnancy test. Six months earlier, I was in the same clinic anticipating my first glimpse of the 9.5 week old embryo inside of me. When my physician fired up the ultrasound, I saw a tiny bean on the screen. It looked far tinier than I remembered my daughter looking when she was an 8 week embryo. Then my OB measured the heartbeat. It was slow, and the embryo measured three weeks behind. My baby was dying. Though I knew that those first few weeks of pregnancy are the most tenuous, the memory of the pain I endured from my last chemical pregnancy took over me and I nearly fainted in front of my OB and husband. Now I was back in the same room, this time without my husband, about to confirm a pregnancy I was hoping for over two years prior.

The profile of an embryo flashed on the monitor. It looked much larger than the last poor embryo I lost. That was a comforting sight! “Looks good,” my physician assured me as she continued to survey my pelvic cavity with the ultrasound wand. The baby slipped from view but then suddenly re-emerged, this time in a frontal view. I was very confused as to how I could see a baby in profile and then almost instantly view it head on. “I don’t understand how to read ultrasounds,” I thought to myself. But my OB grew suspicious. She was silent for what felt like forever, studying the ultrasound monitor very intently. I began to feel slightly tense.

Suddenly, two embryos appeared on the screen (Fig. 1). She found what she was looking for.

“F**************k,” I groaned under my breath. I’m not usually one to swear.

I began to panic. I couldn’t believe this was real. Twins don’t run in my family, how could this happen to me? I have read some women’s reactions to the news that they are bearing twins. Some women have wanted twins all their life and are elated when they receive the news. Clearly, from my reaction, I was not one of those women. Some people look at parents juggling twin babies and feel pity for them, unable to fathom the exorbitant amount of work it must take to raise more than one child simultaneously. This was not crossing my mind, either. I knew very little about twins, but what I did know at the time of the diagnosis was that carrying twins comes with a host of difficulties and immediately launches my pregnancy into high-risk. After suffering through losses, and waiting years to make another baby, I have made two babies with a tenuous outcome. Instead of dealing with an early loss of one baby, I could face a late loss of two babies. How could I possibly endure it?

“I’ve heard of cases with twins where one dies very early and gets absorbed by the other. Is that still a possibility?” I foolishly asked my OB in hope that my situation might turn into a normal singleton pregnancy.

“Not at this point,” she assured me. The embryos were too far along and looked too healthy, which of course was actually a good thing. She continued, “Now we’ll need to figure out if they’re di-di, mono-di, or mono-mono.” These words were completely foreign to me. I knew twins came in two flavors: fraternal (dizygotic) and identical (monozygotic). “If they are mono-mono then we have a problem but those are extremely rare. These are likely mono-di or di-di. Di-di is the safest, but we can work with mono-di. Right now the membranes are too thin to tell what type of twin you have, but we’ll be able to tell over time when the membranes get thicker.”

My head was spinning. I was sent home with a packet of standard pregnancy pamphlets, plus a giant list of supplements to take especially for women expecting twins.

My husband could not attend the appointment because he had a class to teach that morning. I got out of the appointment 15 minutes before his class would begin so I gave him a call.

“I have good news and bad news,” I told him. “Good news is the baby looks healthy! Bad news, if you want to call it that, is there are actually two babies. And with that, I’m going to let you go so you can teach your class.” My husband began laughing. I could tell he was smiling ear to ear. I wasn’t sure how he would handle the news but I wasn’t expecting him to be so happy about it. I’ve got to say that his enthusiasm did ease my mind a bit, and for the first time since the initial discovery, I began to feel a little excited too.

Early symptoms of a twin pregnancy

After my twin diagnosis, a lot of my early pregnancy symptoms began to make sense. My symptoms had surprised me for being stronger than I remember with my first, singleton pregnancy. In retrospect, five early symptoms were possibly indicative of twins.

My momo journey

After the twin diagnosis, my pregnancy experience would be vastly different from my previous singleton pregnancy. Because my pregnancy was now classified as high-risk, I would have to visit a maternal fetal medicine (MFM) specialist at the perinatology clinic every two weeks. The upside would be plenty of ultrasounds. As long as the lower of the two twins was head-down by 24 or so weeks, I could anticipate a vaginal delivery as late as 37 weeks. The book, When You’re Expecting Twins, Triplets, or Quads, by Dr. Barbara Luke et al. (Fig. 4) quickly assured me that a twin pregnancy did not have to result in underweight, fatally premature, or developmentally malformed offspring. I highly recommend the book to anyone expecting multiples. Despite my optimism, a later surprise diagnosis would launch my pregnancy into extreme lows but also some highs, and I would have a lot more to learn about what it takes to safely carry twins. I don’t know where my journey through twin pregnancy will take me. But I hope by the end I will be taking home two healthy momo twins. Please join me on my momo journey!

Please feel free to share your experience of when you learned you were expecting multiples in the comments below!