Essay Contest.....

Thank you so much for entering the Ladies’ Home Journal “The Day That Changed My Life” 2000 word essay contest! We are so looking forward to reading your essay, and you can rest assured that we have received it.

The contest will run until December 7th, 2012, and we will choose a winner on or about February 1, 2013. If you are chosen as the winner, an editor will contact you then. If you are not the winner, you will receive notice within a few weeks after our winner is officially chosen. (Prize is $3000 and publication in the magazine.)

Thank you so much, and good luck!

The Editors at Ladies’ Home Journal

Things My One Pound Twins Taught Me

There are some things in life that are not predictable because you don’t know they exist. It never ran through your mind, and because you have never heard of it, there was no way to fear it.

By the time the pregnancy test came along, we had been through a lot as a couple; peeing on ovulation sticks, waiting for the smiley face to appear indicating “go time,” keeping my legs in the air for 20 minutes to let gravity help the sperm swim to the desired location. We endured miscarriage, fertility meds, the infamous “shots in the bum”, and something else which never gets mentioned when Giuliana Ransic talks about IVF on a reality show…..the money. Going through another IVF treatment is not possible financially. If it doesn’t work, it’s over, it’s a one shot deal. It has to work. There is pressure in this pregnancy test, anxiety-producing pressure.  The results were in. I gasped and shook.

Two little sunflower seeds were spotted on the ultrasound. So small I didn’t notice them. I thought there was nothing there, an image I had seen months earlier during an ultrasound where the nurse informed me it would eventually miscarry. I braced myself for the disappointing news. When he said the words this time, It was magic and because I was not expecting it, I was shocked. I called my husband and said, “The doc asked, ‘can you count to two?’ It’s twins.” We were both silent on the phone, taking a deep breath. For the next few months, the pregnancy would become a whirlwind of happiness for us, our family, and everyone who knows us.

Sometime around week 20, not long after the gender ultrasound indicating we were having a boy and a girl, I woke up and there was blood. My heart pounded, a lump came into my throat. I thought it was over. I called my husband and when he answered, my voice did not work. I was diagnosed with having a hemorrhage, and was told the babies may not be affected by it. They were moving around but my hemorrhage was growing fast and filling with blood. I worried constantly and slept very little, but I tried to remain optimistic and hoped for the best.

And then it happened. It was April 12,  2012 when the babies spoke from the womb. They said, “We are headed out and there is no stopping us.”  It has been theorized that preemies know when it is time to be born. I didn’t know that a person could get pregnant, be half way through the pregnancy term, sixteen weeks to go, no baby bump,  food cravings, weird smelling sensations or baby showers, and suddenly give birth to a couple of one-pound babies, then watch them develop in an incubator instead of a tummy.

When I got to the emergency room, doctors and nurses started piling in, too many to count. A nurse asked my due date……..  “August fourth,” I said. She did some quick calendar math and said, “This is a non-viable pregnancy.” The babies were delivered, taken away from me, and given oxygen and feeding tubes. One doctor told us, “Your daughter was trying so hard to breathe on her own, we actually let her try for a few seconds.”

Harper weighed one pound five ounces. Robinson weighed one pound seven ounces. We decided to name them after two strong historical figures, the famed author Harper Lee and the courageous Jackie Robinson who endured suffering in order to pave a path for African-Americans to play major league baseball.  

The next day, my husband and I walked through a door at the hospital labeled “NICU,” Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, which was like walking into a science-fiction movie where they were growing babies. A line of incubators, babies under bright lights, all looking alike, perfectly still and facing upward. The sound of oxygen machines mimic an ocean…..monitors chime indicating a baby in distress. They don’t look much like babies…..eyes sealed shut,  translucent skin, no sounds of crying. They were the size of a beanie baby. Parents in the nicu walk around in a fog, wondering how this could have happened.

The next few weeks were spent listening, learning and watching.  The doctors do their rounds from baby to baby, nurses walk by, several of them pregnant; it’s all in slow motion. Are they hiding information from us? We were asked if we wanted to have a baptism as the babies were fighting for their lives. We were still in shock, sitting next to incubators and waiting. Waiting for babies to grow. Minutes ticked by. Days. Weeks. Have we eaten? We didn’t know. Pumping breast milk every three hours, the nurses said every drop will help heal them, and I held onto this as my only source of control. Instead of walking around the workplace pregnant, and having strangers touch my tummy in a grocery store line, we would come to the hospital and help our babies grow. That exciting pregnancy whirlwind we were on came to a halt. I wanted to close my eyes and have 30 days pass, just so the babies could have gained one more pound. Getting from one pound to two was the longest stretch of time, over 30 days, it was by the far the most difficult.

The nurses were people we did not know in our ordinary lives. They didn’t belong to my Bunco club, I didn’t know them from the neighborhood, the workplace or my Facebook connections. They were strangers; they were handed our babies on April 12th and told to make them healthy for us to take home on our due date, August 4^th. The nurses became our hope, our heroes. It’s a bizarre feeling to surrender your power to strangers, to trust that their skill and knowledge can lead you and your children out of this seemingly helpless situation.  Almost immediately, about day two, the nurses started to make comments that gave us normalized feelings. “Harper is so strong, she’s going to be running a board room someday.” It gave her a personality. “Robbie is a cutie, he will follow her around, adoring her.” It made them seem like two real human beings, not micro-preemies filled with tubes and monitors and picc lines. After the babies were off critical status, they were placed in the same pod, and we felt comfort in this move. More often than not, their monitors would beep at the same time and the nurses would say, “They are very connected, they are communicating with each other.”  The nurses had hope, so we did too. When we walked into the Nicu every day, the nurses would greet us with smiles, happiness, optimism. I cried on and off throughout the day and night, but the nurses just went about their tasks, helping our children develop, including us in the process whenever they could. I don’t know what made me so emotional;  the possibility of losing the babies, or fears for their future development. More likely, it was simply that there were too many thoughts and feelings and questions at once, with very few answers and no guarantees. Being busy helping take care of the babies helped ease my emotional overwhelm.

When you find yourself at a place in your life, where there is something significant happening that you have virtually no control over, you are forced to take a very close look at your relationship with your Higher Power. This is a critical time in a person's life…in a marriage... it will change you forever. We sought out prayers from everyone we knew.  We begged for miracles. We had to believe a miracle could happen for us.

Harper’s legs were the size of my fingers and she fought hard every day to gain ounces.  Gaining weight was difficult for her. Robbie stopped breathing several times, breathing and eating at the same time was difficult for him. The nurses took drops of my breast milk and fed them from a Q-tip. Robbie was hungry from day one…..he ate from that Q-tip as if it were a steak dinner. It made me happy to know I could contribute to their growth and survival. We were not creating birth announcements, getting pictures of our babies dressed in bows and ball caps as we had imagined, instead nurses put my husband’s wedding ring on Harper’s forearm so we could capture her size for a first photo.

For three and a half months we would become experts of the Nicu, the staff, the shift schedules, the overhead announcements, and the various personalities and patterns of hospital life.  The nurses became our therapists and touchstones. The kids would endure heart surgeries at two weeks old, numerous blood transfusions, brain scans, lab pricks, eye exams and hearing exams. We watched their eye lids develop, their ears form, their eye brows come in, and most emotional of all, the day we heard their voices, 35 days after their birth. We cheered for poops and pees; that felt like normal baby stuff. We stared at machines pumping air into their lungs, making their tiny bodies and the windows shake. We changed diapers the size of monopoly money. We loved to spend time together as a family in our little Nicu room Nine. Sometimes their small head would move slightly in the direction of our voices when we arrived, they seemed to know who we were, they seemed to desire our arrival. They would wrap their small hand around one of our fingers and emotionally that would get us every time. We read books, sang to the babies, took pictures, and held our babies against our bare skin for as long as the nurses would let us. Most of all, we told the babies we believed in them, were proud of them, and whispered in their tiny ears that they could do this. At night when we left, we turned on an artificial heartbeat sound machine that played in their incubators, hoping to give them the feeling of a womb; a place of warmth and safety. A place that was taken away from them.

Except for oxygen tubes and a small monitor, our children did come home slightly prior to their due date, and they looked every bit like a normal set of newborn twins and we looked every bit like proud, nervous first-time parents. And it is true that Harper is strong and bright, and Robbie is a cutie who everyone adores, and they do seem to communicate with each other, the nurses were right, even from day two.

Today, we believe a miracle has taken place in our lives. At eight months old, our babies are strong, healthy and thriving. When we go strolling around the neighborhood, we look like a normal family of four. The babies look like they have had a normal transition from conception to delivery. Most people who see us, and wave from their garage, or look up from their yard work, likely have no thought that there was a day, not so long ago, that we gave birth to 2 one-pound babies who would have to dig deep within themselves, and find the strength to breathe, and grow, and endure pain, and have a will to survive based solely on the voices of their parents telling them they had to do it……..for us.

And so it was that my life was profoundly changed on April 12, 2012 at 8:13 and 8:15 in the evening, when I gave birth to twins at 23 weeks, 6 days gestation. I have become a more inspired person, a person who believes in miracles, a more spiritually grounded person. I have become a better human being because of the kindness that came to me during a time of need from friends and relatives and from nurses who were once strangers who work in a place I had never been to before. I try to do better work at my job, and show more compassion to my clients because I am inspired by the high caliber of work that is being done at the hospital where the kids stayed. I am more emotional, I get choked up over a nice comment made by a Starbucks Barista, as if a part of me became uncovered. There was a time when there were gifts mailed to my newborn children from people we had never met, and a prayer shawl made for me from women who do not know me but heard of my story from 10 states away. So many people, too many to count, came into our lives when we needed the support to help us through our journey. Gifts at our door, emails, notes in the mail, and visits to the hospital… People jumped on planes and prayed from all over the country. There is comfort in that kind of community, to know there are people rooting for our family, for the one-pound babies, and it made a difference. It enabled us to bring a positive spirit each day, for the 110 days we walked through the front doors of the Nicu and in turn that helped the babies have the strength they needed to continue fighting and growing and believing they had the strength of 100 people. In a sense they did.