Author: Sarah Haxby

After the birth of our son my husband was reluctant to have the second child that we always planned on. It was a long process ending up in an emergency c-section and my husband was afraid that would happen again. Although not an overly traumatic tale, I think he was a little traumatised by the whole thing.

Skip to a year later, we had a lovely date day and he agreed to try for our second child. We decided to wait until the middle of the year so there would be about a 2 year age gap.

6 weeks pregnant with twins

Amazingly I fell pregnant the first month we tried. Went to the doctor for my routine checks and my hcg levels jumped a lot quickly. I joked to my husband that it was a sign of twins. For the next two weeks until my first scan we both kept talking about twins and having dreams about twins. So when my early scan arrived at 6 weeks it was no surprise to us that there were two.

Early pregnancy was pretty non eventful, didn’t have any morning sickness of note apart from feeling queasy and going off meat. It was agonising waiting for that next scan to make sure they were both still there as my doctor had told me about vanishing twins, a fact I would have been happier not knowing about!

10 weeks pregnant with twins

I opted to have the harmony test at 10 weeks so we found out at this point we were having two girls. We were told we were having dcda twins so they were fraternal however we discovered through twins research Australia there was actually a chance that they were identical.

My pregnancy remained rather non eventful. I had a little bit of carpal tunnel, my heart rate was elevated but it was just due to having two placentas so nothing sinister. At my 32 week scan the girls were tracking well and measuring about 2.5kg.

32 weeks pregnant with twins

At 32+3 I was feeling rotten, I was crampy, felt ill and just generally yuck. We went to the beach and whilst in the water I felt wonderful. However, once I got out it all returned. When we returned home I had a tiny amount of spotting so I went straight into the hospital. After being monitored for a few hours and getting scans I was sent home with pain killers.

Giving birth to twins at 32+4

At 4:30am the next morning when I was 32+4 I woke and then felt a pop and gush. My waters had broken. When I turned on the lights it looked like a murder scene. There was blood everywhere. I phoned the hospital from the toilet and they assured me blood was normal but I needed to come in. So off we went with our 22 month old son to the hospital arriving at 5.10am.

Once up in the labour room I was told that the amount of blood was not normal and that I either had a placental abruption or something else which I can’t remember. So I was given the steroid injection and was whisked off to theatre for my second emergency c-section while my husband called his parents to look after our son.

Twins born at 32 weeks 2 days

The girls were born at 6:40am and 6:41am weighing a healthy 2.76kg and 2.47kg. Both crying and making lots of noise. As the steroid wasn’t given early enough to have any effect the girls needed to have some breathing support initially. Twin A indeed had a placental abruption but thankfully they got them out before it became life threatening.

Our bigger twin (twin A) had high flow room air for 24 hours and our smaller had CPAP room air on and off for 5 days. As soon as they were both off breathing support we were downgraded from NICU to special care. On day 7 twin A starting dropping her oxygen saturation levels so was placed on low flow oxygen for a couple of days. Once off that she had to be kept on her tummy for a while as her levels kept dropping when she was on her back.

The girls stayed in hospital for 30 days altogether, learning to suck feed (they had weight gain and maintaining body temp mastered within a few days).