This last Monday as the worst I’ve had during my pregnancy. Feeling torn up inside and out with a backache that had not stopped in more than 24 hours, I finally broke down, called Travis at work to share an incoherent stream of sobbing about how horrible! this! is! and I’m! so! tired! and will you come save me from all this PLEASE?!
Four doses of Vicodin later, I was deliriously laying in bed watching the world’s worst episode of Oprah, when Trav walked in with a card, flowers and dinner.
I had forgotten it was Valentines day. And all I needed was his smile to blow away those clouds of pain.To my lovely valentine, I love you. Thank you for getting me through all the discomfort, nuttiness and insanity of the last 8 months. I can’t wait to meet our new future with you and our girls.
For months now, a group of much-loved, well-meaning individuals have been begging to see a certain photo of me. You know which one I’m talking about: The Belly Shot. And for months, I have resisted. Not because I think I’m ugly. Not because I think it’s embarrassing. And not because I don’t want to remember this. No, it’s because:
1) I personally think Belly shots are the photographic equivalent of a Mime. Disembodied images without legs or heads or faces that could, in fact, be ANYBODY…and crap. I just realized I could have avoided a fat lot of facebook arguing if I’d just Googled “Belly Shot” and pasted the first shot of a pregnant, naked stomach I found.
2) I hate having pictures taken of me.
3) I hate having BAD pictures taken of me*.
4) I hate the idea of NAKED PARTS pictures taken of me.
The whole concept just seems so…exhibitionist. Call me Victorian or Puritan or whatever you like. But I guarantee you, the world will never see my nekkid belly.
However, I DID very much want photographs of our once in a lifetime event. Beautiful photos of all of us – and there was only one person I wanted to take them. My talented friend and colleague from the City of Newcastle, Rick Takagi**, generously arranged on very short notice to come shoot us at home at the start of our 33rd week.
When we found ourselves admitted to the hospital just two days before that, Rick reworked the shots he’d planned and came to us anyway. He walked the entire hospital looking for inspirations as Trav wheeled me around like the ankle-swollen cripple I was, and worked magic in a place where most folks would see only signs and blank hallways and white coats.
These photos are beautiful. They’re REAL. And I couldn’t have dreamed of anything more perfect. Thank you, Rick – a million times over, thank you!
*Happens in 9 out of 10 shots when I’m invariably caught in A) gawky awkward boring frontal pose, B) bad hair/bad light/bad background, and C) a stark 90-degree angle featuring the ginormity on my face known as Quasimonose.
**Rick’s work has been featured in National Geographic Magazine, CNN, 425 magazine, Seattle Magazine, Seattle Weekly, Parade and Steve Job’s 2010 iPad announcement presentation. He recently started working with Getty Images and there are days when I can’t get over the fact that A) I know him and B) he did this for us. But then I remember that’s just the awesome kind of guy he is. See more of his photographs at http://ricktakagi.zenfolio.com/or follow him on facebook here.
After first moving to Seattle, there were nights when Al would disappear for hours on end. Systematically checking room to room to room, wondering for the life of me WHERE the hell he could possibly be. There were only so many places! Did he vanish into thin air?! Had he secretly become a ninja? Was I temporarily blind? Particularly frustrated in my hunt one night, I flicked on the light in our spare room, paused just a little bit longer, and proceeded to laugh my ass off.
The cat you are looking for is not here…
So…yeah. Triplets. More than a few of you may be surprised to learn we’re already in week 32 and wondering why I kept such huge news under wraps for so long. Especially when I tell you that the average term for triplets IS 32 weeks. So…yeah. This could happen any day. All I can say is that I had a really good reason for my silence. Actually, it was more like a huge, long, scary-ass list.
To tell you that Trav and I stared at that ultrasound screen with completely different reactions feels like an understatement of such a degree as to compare it to God telling Noah it’s going to rain a little bit next month, so he might think about going down to the local boat show and round up a few of his favorite pets.
Trav sat in the dark exam room, watching three flickering stars on the screen with a look of awe and love that I’ve never seen on him before. But I could only lay there looking at him, with one thought in my head.
‘WHAT. HAVE. I. DONE?’
A huge sense of dread filled my heart as the image of three unbearably tiny babies in incubators flashed through my mind. All those years I spent hanging out at my mother’s office in Labor & Delivery – seeing NICU babies covered in tubes and tape; hearing about 20 week babies that couldn’t be saved; asking about an image of an infant born without the top of its head (anencephaly), haunted by its horrifying, giant, empty eyes – I knew what they had just told us wasn’t exactly good news.
The word ‘Triplets’ reverberated over and over, making it impossible not to question whether my pride and unwillingness to accept infertility had just doomed our miracle. That the consequences of blind desire were being visited on my children. Who I might now never meet.
“It’s okay, it’s all right,” Trav saw the tears in my eyes, gripped my hand and smiled his brand new smile. “Really, everything will be fine!”
He was able to talk me off my ledge long enough for me to really look at the ultrasound and let the beauty of those flickering lights replace the doubt in my heart.
Twenty minutes later, our doctor came in wearing a look I’ve never seen on a doctor’s face before: masked fear. And I knew I had been right to be afraid.
“WOW.” she said, looking at the chart and not us. “This is a surprise, for sure.” Trav and I began thanking her for getting us here, a place we never thought we’d reach.
“Well, don’t thank me yet,” her face a mixture of seriousness and disappointment. “We…really don’t consider triplets a successful outcome. They are considered very high risk pregnancies and a lot can go wrong. I’m going to refer you to a perinatal group where you’ll need to talk about reduction.”
Reduction. I knew exactly what she meant (if not how it worked) as soon as she said it. Just as I was horrifyingly aware of the impact of each and every item as she continued down the list of major risks:
- Premature birth (occurs in 90% of triplets)
- Low birth weight (4 times more likely than in a singleton pregnancy)
- Miscarriage (extremely likely to happen with triplets before/by 20 weeks)
- Cerebral Palsy (caused by damage to the motor control centers of the developing brain; 5-6 times more likely in triplets)
- Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (disproportionate blood transfusion between twins – one gets more, the other less, exposing both to severe disability or death)
- Birth defects/Handicap (50% more likely)
- Stillbirth
| Week of Pregnancy | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| Moderate to severe handicap | 65% | 50% | 40% | 20% | 15% | <10% |
| Survival rate | 15% | 45% | 60% | 75% | 80% | 90% |
It took me a week to come to terms with the idea we were having triplets. That all these bad things could happen – and given our track record of everything that could go wrong usually DID, one or more of those problems probably would. But then again…they might not. Because, after all, this wasn’t even supposed to have worked at all. Maybe, once again, it was just a matter of needing more faith. So I chose to have faith.
Later that night, I bled. And I bled. And I bled until I thought I couldn’t bleed anymore.
We went into the clinic first thing the next day. When they put the ultrasound on me (for what must have been the five-hundred thousandth time), I was sure they were gone. They weren’t. I was told this happens a lot with IVF patients, and put on bed rest.
In the weeks that followed, this happened two more times. And the clinic did their very best to take care of us, while simultaneously scaring the bejeesus out of me with statistical data and risks and recommendations of reduction, reduction, reduction.
By week 12, we had met with our perinatologists and reviewed all the same scary-ass information. We kept coming back to the fact that I was just about as likely to miscarry with a reduction than without, and how do you choose, and how many, and how do we live with it? How do we look every day at the one we kept, and be able to rationalize ‘this one’ was in any way more deserving than the others?
The idea was like spitting in the face of God, presuming to edit a miracle. So we didn’t. And despite gaining 50+ lbs, diabetes, and a total inability to do much more now than sit up and lay down, we’ve made it to 32 weeks. We hope to make it a few more.
Repost of an entry deleted during Stargazer’s Domain Transfer Fiasco 2010
There are a lot of things I don’t like about where I’m from – the drugs, the crime, the politics, the heat. But there are also a lot of beautiful things about the Southwest, of which I was recently reminded when a friend posted these production videos by astronomy photographer Tom Lowe.
Timescapes: “Death is the Road to Awe”
TimeScapes: Rapture (features the International Balloon Fiesta)
