Our Story

As many of you know, Brett and I found out that we were pregnant with twins (monozygotic or identical twins) at the end of June.  Twins do not run in either of our families, and we were shocked, to say the least, that there were two babies growing in my belly!  As we searched the internet and books for any information we could find about twins, we learned that identical twins are the kind of twins that do not run in families.  Identical twins come from the same zygote that splits.  To our understanding there is no real scientific explanation of why this happens, and it only occurs in about 1 in 300 pregnancies.  

After the shock wore off and we were no longer looking at each other every few minutes saying, "We are having twins... TWO.." we were excited, nervous, scared, and many other feelings that we couldn't put into words.  The first few months of my pregnancy were easy.  I am blessed that I was not nauseous or sick, just a little tired and since it was summer and I am a teacher, I had the time to nap and rest when I needed to.  In the beginning of August we were even able to take a trip out to San Francisco and Yosemite with Brett's brother Michael and his wife Gina.  We had a great time.  

We were scheduled for our 20 week ultrasound on August 30th, the first week of school.  We were so excited to find out what we were having and also to have the opportunity to see the babies again!  This was only our second ultrasound, so we didn't know what exactly what to look for, but as the ultrasound tech was looking at the babies, I could just tell something was wrong.  She was very quiet and didn't say much when I asked questions.  This made me very nervous.  Toward the end, she was typing some results into computer and I saw that she had noted that one of the babies' hearts was "abnormal".  She left the room and we waited for the doctor.  


When the doctor and two other people came into the room, we knew it was something bad.  He informed us that the babies had what is called Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome (ttts).  TTTS occurs when the babies share a placenta and therefore have blood vessels that connect them, allowing blood to flow from one to the other.  The problem occurs when the placenta is defective and one twin receives too much blood (the recipient) and the other (the donor) does not receive enough.  This causes the donor baby to have too little blood and therefore many times is anemic and smaller.  Our donor baby was measuring about 2 weeks smaller that the other baby.  The recipient baby then has to try to accommodate and pump the extra blood, but most often and the farther along they are in TTTS, the baby's heart is not able to pump out all of the extra blood.  This causes great stress and major heart problems for the recipient baby.  Our recipient had serious heart problems, including a leaky valve, an enlarged heart, and hydrops, or fluid in her body.  


After receiving the news, we were taken into a conference room where they told us that they would be contacting the Fetal Care Center in Cincinnati to see if they would take our case.  There are only a few centers in the country that do the procedure that we needed.  They told us they would call and let us know.  We left the hospital just crushed and upset.  We had gone in to get good news, and left not knowing if either of our babies would survive.  It was probably the lowest point in both of our lives.  We prayed and prayed that the people in Cincinnati would take our case and that they would take it soon, as each day that passed without doing something would only make it harder on our babies.  


We found out the next day around 4:00 that we had appointments in Cincinnati the following morning and potentially go into surgery that night.  They told us to plan on being there for a week.  We both left work, unsure what the next few weeks would hold, packed up our things, and left around 6:00 pm.  We were both very scared and knew that we had to trust God!