Anatomy Of A Miracle

 By Sara Schley
Web Exclusive

“Birth has a purpose for the mother,” my friend, home-birth midwife, and teacher Terri Nash told me as I sat on her screen porch on a late summer morning, three months pregnant with twins, my feet in her lap. “It initiates her into the next phase of her spiritual development,” Terri continued. “For the deepening of her soul.”

A few weeks ago Terri’s words would have made no sense. After five years of infertility treatments, I was finally pregnant. Forty-one-years-old, I was also more physically ill than I had ever been in my life. In addition to the nausea, vomiting, fatigue, and discomfort that many women also experience, I had just recovered from a rare condition brought on by the infertility treatments called Ovarian Hyperstimulation. In three days I had gained 20 pounds of water, looked like I was seven-months pregnant, and felt like my organs were going to explode. I ended up on the OB unit of the hospital to be monitored for a week. But the twins and I managed to survive this life-threatening condition and as Terri spoke I sensed an awakening of my spirit. Maybe this pregnancy, labor and delivery of twins might hold some promise and power for me. Maybe I would be initiated into a phase of womanhood that had eluded me for the first four decades of my life, maybe I would learn something profound as these babies came through me into the world.

On a routine check-up at 28 weeks, my nurse midwife looked at me with compassionate eyes. “From now on, you’re on your back,” Liza said.

“I don’t understand,” I frowned. I am an athlete, a former Outward Bound instructor, a veteran of basic training in the Israeli Army, and a woman whose friends describe as “physically tough.” Yet this experience of gestating twins, like no other, was bringing me to my knees.

“You’re at 28 weeks but your uterus is the size of a 40-week full-term pregnancy. It ‘thinks’ it’s time to deliver. It’s much too early and too dangerous for these babies to be born now. You’re already 80 percent effaced. Your son’s head is right on your cervix. From now until delivery, gravity is your enemy.”

Liza spun her pregnancy due date dial and calculated that the bed rest would last until January 10th, which was the anniversary of my grandmother Freda’s death, a sacred time in the tradition of my people. I would name my daughter after her. “That’s seven weeks and a couple of days from now,” Liza said. “I know this will be difficult for you, but believe me, for the sake of your babies every day counts.”

So I bought a calendar and my husband Joe and I checked off the endless days of December. On New Year’s Eve, lying on my left side eating garlic roasted chicken and playing Rummy Cube with our friends Mishy and Chris, I felt a gush of something cool and wet. My waters broke. The moon was full and glistening off the December snow. I called Terri. She confirmed that I needed to go right to the hospital.

The babies could be born at any minute and they were too premature to be delivered in our small town rural hospital. A shot of steroids (to mature their lungs) and antibiotics (to prevent infection) later and I was in the ambulance heading to the big city hospital at 12:01 AM of Jan 1, 2002. Mercifully, the nurse on call for ambulance rides that night was someone I knew from my hometown. She was warm and reassuring, holding my hand and watching the fetal heartbeat monitors as we headed south at high speed.

Conventional wisdom states that babies are born within 24 hours of their waters breaking so I thought we might get New Year’s twins. But upon arrival at the hospital and meeting the head of Obstetrics, we learned that we had another option. Since I was currently at 33 weeks, these next two weeks of gestation were critical to the babies’ safe development. Lungs, suck, swallow reflex and size of the babies would all develop and were crucial to their safety. The doctors advised, and we strongly agreed, that every day they could stay on “the inside” was a gift. They would monitor me for infection and as long as none developed, we would wait ten more days to induce labor.

Ten days of hospital bed “rest” on the high risk OB floor followed. I was strapped at my girth and monitored, injected and measured, cuffed and fed. Joe was loyal and loving, bringing me mocha frappes from the hospital’s ice cream store to fatten our little girl up, playing endless games of rummy 500, and sleeping by my side on the sleepless hospital cot.

Joe and I also did a lot of negotiating.

High risk OB floor protocols are thick with tradition and fear. We’d been warned by our homebirth midwife friends that the chance of avoiding a Caesarian in this environment was close to zero. “We’re trained to catch and they’re trained to cut,” Terri explained. For fear of malpractice suits, convenience of the doctors, safety of the babies, or whatever, they prefer the predictability of the operation over the mystery of labor.