Laura
Mom to Jared Wayne & Jackson
October 28, 2012
St. Matthews, South Carolina
On May 28, 2011, my husband and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary. On June 3rd, I noticed that I was 3 days late… and I’m NEVER late. I took a pregnancy test that afternoon and to my not-so-much surprise, it came back positive. My husband and I were both excited and nervous. We waited to tell our family until Father’s Day. We had made coffee cups for our fathers that said “To Be Grandpa, Feb. 2012.” My first doctor’s appointment was in the middle of July. We had an ultrasound done at our first appointment. I was around 10 weeks or so and to our astonishment, there were two little babies showing up on the monitor. My husband and I were floored! We went home and shared the news with our families and my side [of the family] reminded me that when I was little, I always said I was going to have twins.
When we went for our anatomy scan at 16 weeks, we found out we were having identical twin boys. My husband and I were over the moon because we always wanted a little boy and now we were going to have TWO little boys. The ultrasound technician wasn’t as bubbly as she had been during our first ultrasound. She said that she was concerned that our babies, at 16 weeks, already had a size discrepancy of 1 ounce. That didn’t seem like much to me at the time, but little did I know that it was a symptom of Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome. TTTS is caused when identical twins share blood abnormally from the placenta. Only 20% of identical pregnancies will be diagnosed with TTTS and it looked like my pregnancy was going to be one of them.
I was immediately sent to the Charlotte Fetal Care Center in Charlotte, NC to be scanned by a TTTS specialist. The scan must’ve lasted 2 hours and we were told that we were Stage 1 TTTS (Stage 5 being the worst) and they just wanted to monitor me weekly to see if things got any worse. I went to Charlotte (about an hour and a half from my house) every single week, for 7 weeks, to be monitored. The boys still hadn’t progressed any from Stage 1, but the size discrepancy grew worse and worse with each visit. It had become as bad as a 43% size difference in the two babies.
At 23 weeks, the doctors told me that we needed to go ahead with the fetoscopic laser ablation surgery to separate the placenta for the boys. They were giving Jackson about a 5% chance of survival and Jared a very good chance of survival, 90%. Twenty-four hours after the surgery, we saw two beautiful heartbeats on the ultrasound machine and the doctors were very surprised and pleased – I thought we had beaten the odds. One week after surgery, we went to our weekly appointment and Jared, the baby that the doctors weren’t worried about had no heartbeat. I was crushed. Jackson was still doing well and that gave me something to hold onto. I prayed and pleaded with God to protect my still-living child. Three weeks later, I noticed that I hadn’t felt Jackson move in the last 12 hours or so. I tried the ice water trick, the caffeine trick and the sugar trick and nothing would make him move. My husband and I drove to the hospital to get checked out and about 10 minutes later, the sonographer confirmed my worst fear, Jackson’s heart wasn’t beating. I delivered our beautiful boys on Sunday, Oct. 28, 2012. Jared was born at 11:10 a.m. and Jackson just two minutes later at 11:12 a.m.
Our little boys are forever missed and forever in our hearts… JWS x 2… We Love You!
You can email Laura at: tigergirlusc@hotmail.com
