Happy Birthday to the Gruesome~Twosome!

June 2009

Wow, it hardly seems possible that Sam and Beverly are 23 years old today!  Funnily enough, I say something along similar lines every year!  I wish I had a more recent photo of the two of them together ~ next time Beverly is back home, I must try to remember to take some.

I still vividly remember the day they were born, a Monday ~ Sam at 09.59am and Beverly at 10.01am (by elective C-section).  Adrian was there with me, along with a gaggle of students!  I didn't feel at all well, to be honest; I think the epidural may have had something of an adverse effect on my system.  The room seemed to be full of people, as there were double the staff because I was delivering twins.  I remember the anaesthetist and the surgeon having an argument; she wanted to do a second c-section (another set of twins) and he wanted to wait until the following day!  It was all quite surreal.  All in all, I was in hospital nearly three weeks ~ 10 days before the delivery and another 10 after, waiting for Sam to start feeding properly.

It was a long journey to actually becoming pregnant in the first place.  We had planned on waiting until I was about 30 before having a family, but when I was 23 I started to have menstrual problems.  My periods ground to a complete halt for a while, then were almost continuous for a while longer.  In the end it was discovered that I wasn't ovulating and would have to have fertility treatment to stand a chance of conceiving.  There followed six years of treatment, back and forth to hospital for lots of tests and check-ups.  Eventually we were almost at the end of the rounds of injections, with no success, and were advised that it would perhaps be a good idea to start looking at alternatives, such as adoption.

We duly started to look into this, and had what was to be our final lot of treatment.  I had the initial injections as usual, and went for the scan which would show how many eggs were ready before the final injection.  We were told that there were in fact five eggs and although normally the last injection would have been withheld because of the risk of multiple birth, we were given the choice as to whether we went ahead or not as it was our last attempt.  We decided we might as well go through with it, as we weren't expecting this last attempt to be anymore successful that the previous ones.

I am sure you can imagine our feelings when my next period didn't arrive as expected!  A pregnancy test was duly done ~ still not really believing that the treatment had finally been successful.  To our utter amazement, I was indeed pregnant!  Then, of course, was came the realisation that actually there could be up to five babies!  Seven weeks into the pregnancy I went for a scan, which to our relief showed only two heartbeats.

The pregnancy progressed well, with only a slight worry at 10 weeks when I started to bleed a little.  Thankfully, it came to nothing and I continued working until a week before I could officially go on maternity leave; I took that final week as holiday.  At just over 36 weeks, I had a routine internal examination and my gynaecologist told me that he could feel "a spongy mass".  The placentas were below the babies which meant I would have to have an elective c-section ~ Sam was also in the breach position.  As my blood-pressure was starting to become high, I was admitted to hospital and had the children about 10 days later.

They both spent a couple of days in the special care unit before joining me up on the ward.  They were good weights, Sam being 5lbs 12oz and Beverly 6lbs 8.5oz.  Sam was a little slow to start feeding properly but once he got the hang of it, things were fine.  And as you can see, they have both turned out wonderfully! 

Adrian and I are so proud of our "gruesome-twosome"...