Ultrasound, April 14, 2011

I’m happy to report that positioning for the twins has improved 75% in the last 2 ½ weeks. They were double breech, an automatic c-section combo. Now Twin B is hanging out head down in the back, while Twin A sprawls sideways in front of her like a backslash. People who have noticed me looking especially stickie-outie in the last two weeks can understand: we take up more room front to back when the three of us are in single file. I’m sure somebody, probably A the quirky one, got tired one night of me tossing and turning from left side to right side in an endless ricochet and decided that nobody really had to have the bottom bunk. It’s still a combo that is delivered by c-section, but it is definitely a step in the right direction. If Twin A gets tired of Twin B’s toes tickling her ear, she may decide to give the head-down lifestyle a try.

Our biggest good news is that a normal 24-week scan for mono-di twins is a huge milestone. It means the placenta and dual umbilical cords formed correctly and we are past worrying about TTTS. The tech took Doppler readings of my heartbeat through the cord veins and arteries and the blood supply looks equal. Great news! The only disappointing thing about our 24-week scan was: No Pictures! I came home, empty-handed, to Craig wanting to see more little black-and-white renditions of hands and feet, soft palates and bases of spines. The reason we didn’t get a photo booth keepsake to commemorate this scan was that though two babies still flashed by on the screen and the tech did record their heartbeats, this scan didn’t measure the babies.

Years from now, we will NOT look lovingly down at the photo album and say “Awww, look! There’s my placenta. How adorable is that!” or “Yes, I remember when my cervix was long and closed!” I don’t even WANT a picture of any of it. Truth be told, I think that placentas and umbilical cords are slimy and disgusting, and the thought of having a few inside of me engages my yuck factor. I was too drugged to notice the delivery of the placenta after I had Devon, which was fine with me, and when Craig (ever the biologist) launched into a description of it ("I was amazed at how HUGE it was, Krista. Like a PIE PLATE! And it had all these blood vessels snaking around it like red and blue--") in recovery I had to cut him off.

Another odd fact about pictures is that in the past week the mysterious entity http://2.bp.blogspot.com has ripped the sonogram pics off my blog and posted them on Google Images. I spent the morning trying to change the security settings to keep my twins from being carelessly disseminated through the ether without my permission. No luck, thus far. I feel that being the owner of said blog and fetuses gives me enough of a copyright that I can expect that my images not end up on somebody’s powerpoint. I’ve heard about this happening. Moms post sweet baby pictures on Facebook and see their babies selling cereal in an Internet ad a few weeks later. People post pictures of their diet progress on a weight loss blog and end up on a makeover site, with their pictures used as "Before" shots and models comprising the "After" pictures. Didn’t think it would happen to my twins, but it could be worse. I’m glad I didn’t upload any pictures of my placenta.