I’m pregnant… I hope.

I am married for the second time; this is baby number five for me. So we’ve been here before. We know the drill. It’s exciting… and really scary.

My husband and I need to do IVF to fall pregnant. We’d had success twice over and had two lovely little boys. I wanted ‘just one more baby….. please’. So we went ahead with yet another round of craziness and found ourselves again with the delightful news of “yes, you’re pregnant”. At the embryo insertion we had two popped in.

I’m old. I was told my chances of falling pregnant at all were less than 10 %, so it was decided to go ahead with two embryos and that would increase my chances of becoming pregnant with one baby. At our clinic you have a blood test when they tell you to and you are also booked for an ultrasound at seven weeks. At that point the obstetrician is looking for a sweet little heartbeat. It’s black and white on the screen and simply looks like a tiny light flicking on and off.

The day has come. My husband has taken time away from work to join me for this momentous day. Is there anything more delightful than seeing your baby for the very first time? Maybe when you get to hold them at the birth, although I’m not sure. That first, pictorial glimpse is pretty special. It makes me suck my breath in, hard. Delightful.

We’re here, early, for our appointment. The other children are at school and being babysat. I’m terrified but my husband is saying very little. All those appropriate platitudes but it’s washing over me. All I can think is ‘phantom pregnancy’. I make a snappy call to my mother under the ‘guise of checking how the younger children are and then she asks how I’m doing. “Are you excited Darling?” she asks….. “Mum I think there’s no baby at all” and I burst into tears. She talks me through it as only a mother knows how. My husband quietly sitting next to me, still in the car, with his hand on my knee gently patting in a loving, tender way. The minutes tick by. I gather myself, apply the poker face to cover the terror and in we go.

I know my obstetrician pretty well. I don’t love him like some women love their obstetricians but I respect his role in the making of my family. He’s the third wheel in our “making babies sideshow”. We like him, but man… we wish he wasn’t there sometimes. IVF takes you places you don’t want to go, but that’s a whole other kettle of little fish.

My obstetrician’s wife is his office manager and she greets us with absolute delight. Laughing that we are here, for this…. again. “Will you ever have enough children?” she asks… I laugh, politely. Remembering, I think there is no baby there at all.

The examination begins and for some reason we brought our video camera along. The assistant is holding the video and my husband is holding my hand. The ultrasound is underway and immediately we can see two blobs. No flashing lights though, just blobs. My obstetrician is not talking. Not a word. He is intent on the tiny screen, moving the probe back and forth, back and forth. from one blob to the other and back again. Still he says nothing.

My husband speaks up, as by this stage we are both thinking the worst. “James, please say something, what can you see?”…. and so he begins to speak. He clears his throat and takes a pretty deep breath. I start to cry. “Well, it’s obviously twins… they are both fine, about seven weeks gestation which is right but I’m just checking to see if….. hmmm.. yes… I’m pretty sure they are identicals. You tell by the dividing membrane at this early stage and yes, I’m quite sure, as sure as I can be……” He keeps talking and now I am sobbing. I also swore, just a little, a tiny inoffensive word, one that summed up exactly how I was feeling.

Ecstatic. Mind bogglingly blissed out. I have two babies, not none, not one, but two. Count them again please one, two. Two!

Then it hit me. In a flash. I’m 41, I have four children and I’m pregnant with twins. This is going to be hard on me physically. That was almost my first thought. I have to look after myself so I can gestate these babies to a descent size. Oh, and we asked him to look really hard for the third baby. Identical twins come from one embryo splitting into two. We had another embryo in there somewhere. He looked, it hadn’t made it. So not triplets… just twins. Just twins.

His wife, the office manager, was holding her breath as we came back out into the foyer. We were laughing in that shocked kind of, relieved kind of way. We blurted out to everyone in the waiting room…. “we’re having twins, identical twins!”. Everyone looked thrilled for us. A number of Dads looked horrified and relieved that it wasn’t them.

I rang my mother and my daughter and a couple of dear friends and cried and laughed and laughed and cried.

I spent the rest of the day mentally re-checking myself. I was going to have six children.

Twins…who knew ?

Thanks Susan