Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Quints Pregnancy- Months 1 & 2

So what a whirlwind these past 20 weeks have been. I'm going to try to remember everything that we've been through up to this point in my pregnancy. Here we go....

This summer, Steven and I decided we wanted to try for "one more baby". I am 33 and I liked the idea of my kids being close in age. I got a prescription of Clomid, the same fertility drug I took when I got pregnant with Brady, and I got pregnant the first month (I always get pregnant the first try). The day after I took a positive pregnancy test we left for vacation. We went to Orange Beach for the week and everything went fine. The day after we got home from vacation, I started bleeding. I immediately knew it was a miscarriage. It was the weekend so I couldn't do anything other than let nature take it's course. I was only 5 weeks along, so it was like having a heavy period. The next Monday, I called my doc and went in for a blood test which confirmed I had miscarried. Because I miscarried so early, I didn't have to wait to try again, but Steven and I decided to wait and think things through. We both agreed that there wasn't any sense in continuing to go through the heartache that comes with miscarriages. We decided to try one more time and that was it,  no matter what. If it happened then we'd be happy and we'd be a family of 4...if it didn't happen, then we'd be perfectly happy with our sweet Brady. Our lives was a family of 3 was wonderful. I honestly didn't feel like anything was missing. We wanted Brady to have a sibling to grow up with and play with, plus, I love being a mommy. Brady has brought so much joy to our lives, we thought one more kid would just be icing on the cake.

So, after deciding to give it one last try, Steven really wanted us to go back to the fertility specialist and at least give this last try our best shot. So that's just what we did. I surprisingly got an appointment very quickly and we were in Dallas within the month. He checked me and everything looked good, so this time the fertility specialist prescribed Clomid, plus a medicine that you inject into your stomach called Follistrum, plus a drug to inject to make you ovulate at a certain time. He gave me the lowest dosages of all the drugs. So at the end of August, I started the medicine. I had a very strict schedule that I had to stick to, even to the hour of when to take some of the meds. I also had to have a sonogram every-other-day starting around day 10 of my cycle to measure my egg growth. I did the sonos in Texarkana and they sent the info to Dallas. Then Dallas would contact me and tell me what to do next. That's all it took. I didn't do any high tech procedures to get pregnant, we took care of that the old fashion way, all I did was take fertility medicine to help me make a good mature egg.

During the week of Sept 16-20 I noticed to was looking extremely bloated around the mid-section. I started feeling short of breath and wasn't feeling well. I started to get scared so I called Dallas and told them how I was feeling. They told me to come in the next day so they could check things out. So Steven and I drove to Dallas. I took a pregnancy test. On Sept. 20 we found out I was pregnant! I wasn't surprised, I've always gotten pregnant the first time I try, but I was very concerned about how I was feeling. They did a sonogram and saw that my tummy was full of fluid, and lots of it. They also saw what they thought were 2 babies!!!! I was only 3 weeks at this point so they were no bigger than a tiny dot, but they were there. I was excited about the idea of twins. I secretly wanted a bigger family but knew with all my problems, it wasn't going to happen because of my age and the fact Steven and I were ready to get finished with the "family building" stage of our lives. My specialist was out of town for this appointment so his partner was the physician treating me, and she said I needed to get some of the fluid out, so I had a procedure done in the office to drain some of the fluid. Let me tell you, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life! I had no idea what she was about to do to me, and what she did wasn't what I was expecting. I lost 6 pounds within the 20 minutes it took her to drain me and that wasn't all the fluid, I still had more at the top of my tummy. After we left, the nurse from Dallas called and said my hormone levels were extremely high and that probably meant I was carrying multiples....which the sono tech had already told us she thought she saw two babies, so that wasn't much of a surprise, but it was at the same time. I wasn't concerned about twins, I was actually happy about it. Little did I know what multiples meant at that point in time.......

A week later, the fluid came back, the doctor told me it would, so we went back to Dallas and I had another sono which confirmed all the fluid was back AND this time, they found 4 babies, possibly 1 or 2 more!! That is the moment, Sept 26, that things started to get overwhelming. I had to have the fluid drained again, I lost 5lbs that time. My doctor was back, and he talked to us about how having 4 babies wasn't a good idea because of all the risks involved with that many babies. That appointment led to a long drive home. It's hard to describe how we felt...the only words that come to mind are, scared, overwhelmed, worried, etc.....

We went back to Dallas on October 9th for another appointment and instead of 4 babies now there were 6!!!!!! My fertility specialist sat us down and told us that we couldn't have six babies, they would have disabilities, or they would die. He said we had 3 choices, reduce from 6 to 2 babies (abortion), or completely abort the whole pregnancy (all babies) and start over again, or do nothing. He said we had to make a decision by 12 weeks. I left that appointment feeling heartbroken and scared, I couldn't understand why this would be happening to us. We cried, we didn't know what to think about anything anymore. The one thing I was sure about is that I wasn't killing my babies. Things continued to get worse because on our way home Steven's mom called to tell us his dad was in a lot of pain and she was taking him to the ER. That night he had emergency surgery for a perforated bowel. While all this was going on with my pregnancy, Steven's dad was dying from lung cancer. It was such a tough time, we couldn't have gotten through it without God. While we were facing these troublesome times, God never left our side.

On October 17 we went back to Dallas and one of the babies had died. We were now down to 5 babies and that's where we're still at today.

Because things were so crazy at the beginning of my pregnancy with the quints, I didn't take any belly pics until I was 8 weeks along. I haven't kept up and taken a pic of each week....I've been busy, overwhelmed and let's not forget the most important thing...I'm a mama!


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