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This post is a bit late as it’s been sitting in my drafts for a while. I’m now over the (horrible, slightly bloody, nerve-wracking) first trimester. There is still a really long way to go and I still take it week to week but I am so very grateful to be here.

At about 12 weeks I had my midwife booking in appointment. She was really lovely as she went through all the various checklists and questions and so thoughtful when asking me to run through my previous pregnancies/miscarriages. Unsurprisingly she recommended a hospital birth due to the twin pregnancy, and the pregnancy has been classed as high risk due to the twins, my thyroid (which admittedly is a non issue according to the NHS guidelines), and my quote ‘geriatric age’ (although I used donor eggs being older than 37 still carries risks). Largely due to the twins I’ll have consultant and midwife combined care.

At 13 weeks and 1 day I had my first NHS scan, the nuchal scan where they test for Down’s, Edwards’ and Patau’s syndromes using a scan and blood test. These usually happen between 10-14 weeks. My hospital is a research hospital and they have a brand new state of the art foetal research unit. This means that at the moment I don’t need to go anywhere near the awful EPU that holds so many bad memories. As it’s a research facility the sonographers are all researchers, I was expecting this but not to have 3 in the room. The ‘trainee’ started to do the scan and straight away they were like “woah twins why didn’t you say?” all I can say is it’s a good job I knew already and they obviously hadn’t read my notes – the reason I didn’t say anything was mainly because I get so nervous about scans. Anyway, the more experienced researcher then had to do the scan whilst the other experienced one fired multiple questions at me and the trainee hovered around. I hardly got to see any of twin 1 because they were constantly asking q’s but I could see they were slowly moving around. I actually got to watch twin 2 a bit more. Just like last time he/she was going a bit crazy – drumming their heels on the edge of the sack and then possibly sucking their thumb. The sonographer found it difficult to take measurements because they were so active. Luckily they settled down after a while.

We then had to wait for the results of the nuchal test which was slightly nerve wracking, though as we’d had PGS on our embryos so we were fairly confident that the twins wouldn’t be high risk, and they weren’t which was a relief.

A week later at 14 weeks I had my first consultant appointment, again at the research centre. It was a bit of a non event. I was told more than once that I was high risk due to my geriatric age. I get it, I don’t think they need to mention it more than once. In the end after a bit of a lecture about blood pressure I felt compelled to point out that my blood pressure is great, until recently I ran 35 miles a week, and i’m still doing some exercise.

More interesting was a very quick discussion about my birth options. My hospital induces ladies pregnant with twins at 37 weeks which I’m not too pleased about but chances are I may not get to then anyway. The consultant was pleased to hear I wanted to try a vaginal birth (I don’t really want to say ‘natural’, aren’t all births to an extent natural? It’s a bit like the ‘are your twins natural?’ question. I’d be so tempted to say something like ‘well I guess so as they’re not plastic’). But at the end of the day isn’t the main thing to have 2 healthy babies, it doesn’t really matter how they arrive.

I now have to wait until 19 weeks for my first proper midwife appointment and 21 weeks for my next scan. It seems a lifetime away!

I’m looking a bit inbetween – is she a bit fat or a bit pregnant? So far I’m managing to hide it fairly well at work I think!

I have some pics of the scan but I don’t know whether to post as they look much more like babies. I guess most people reading this wouldn’t mind?

 

 

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