I decided to get a pregnancy test done after I’d missed my periods by more than a week. The two bright lines from the test looked back at me with a smile. We’d been married for less than a year by that point and my husband and I was not planning to get pregnant. However, this was exciting news for both of us! A couple of weeks later, my doctor called us over for the first scan and looked up at me with a grin. “So, excited about the babies?” she asked. “Babies?”, I asked, startled. My husband and I looked at each other.
That was when we learnt that I was pregnant with twins. I have no family members or friends who had twins and had no idea what to expect. This was completely uncharted territory for me and my husband!
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We called our family over and gave them the news that weekend. “Twins! That’s amazing” shouted my mother. She was happy about getting two grandkids at the same time. The entire family felt elated at this exciting turn of events. They did not even think we would be having kids so soon, let alone two at the same time.
I too grew excited about having twins. However, there was always a degree of fear about the physical challenges this was going to bring. My first trimester passed with a lot of nausea and tiredness. I also had a lot of leg cramps. I started losing weight because of nausea and had to be monitored regularly to ensure that the little ones were healthy and growing in my womb. The second trimester was relatively easier to manage. I just put on a lot of weight and people who didn’t know were also able to guess I was carrying twins. The scan sessions were always stressful. We did not want to know the sex of the little ones. We wanted that to be a surprise!
My third trimester with the twins the really hard part! My legs were swelling up everyday and walking around was literally a pain! Soaking my feet in salted warm water helped me handle this to an extent. “You seem to have developed gestational diabetes” informed my doctor during a routine scan in my third trimester. While this was quite common, the complications of having twins and managing my blood sugar levels made me really anxious. I had to visit a nutritionist, who made changes to my diet during the pregnancy period. I also started taking insulin shots, and medication, to manage the levels. I also had carpal tunnel syndrome from week 24, that caused numbness and a tingling feeling in my hands. Though not severe, this made me very uncomfortable over time. My doctor mentioned that this was becoming common with women pregnant with twins.
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With tiredness, bloating, leg cramps, swelling and a lot of anxiety, I kept nearing my due date. “Did you spill water on the bed?” asked my husband when I was around 36 weeks. It took me a few minutes to realize that my water had broken. We thankfully had our packed hospital bags and we took it and rushed to the hospital. I had to wait for a few hours and we were timing the contractions that had started while I was on the way to the hospital. I had to wait for a while before my doctor reached the hospital and we started discussing the possible modes of delivery. I was inclined towards normal vaginal delivery without the need for labor inducing drugs. However, since I had twins, this was marked a ‘high-risk’ pregnancy and my doctor was closely monitoring every small change. The mode of delivery would solely depend on how my body would react over the next few hours.
My contractions did not intensify for the whole day and my doctor decided to give me epidural to induce dilation. Over the night, I was dilated to about 10 cm and they told me it was time to get the little ones out! I was rushed to the emergency room and after an hour of pushing and struggling, my boy and my girl came out, looking pink and absolutely beautiful! They were mere minutes apart from each other and my doctor told me it was a healthy, textbook delivery irrespective of the complications I had faced for the last 36 weeks! My kids are now about to be a year old and healthy and active. Though giving birth to twins was a definite challenge, looking at both their faces make this absolutely worth all that I had gone through!