The News...

So I just got back from the ultrasound, and got alot more than I bargained for. I can't give a straight "Its a..." answer, because the story is so long and it still doesn't have an end. And I'm tired.

I went in and we started the ultrasound. The tech said "K, this is going to be complicated... because you have twins." I gasped and she said "But hang on, because one of them has died." She continued to check the babies out, and was confused at the smaller twin. He was three ounces smaller, and she thought he had died, but on the screeen we could see a flicker through his chest. So she said that it looked like a heart beat, and it was really slow. Her guess was that he was alive, but that his skull was improperly formed, and his survival chances weren't good. She went to go talk to my doc. He came in and said that they needed more information, and that they were sending me to the hospital to be looked at by a specialist. And to prepare ourselves for knowing that the smaller twin was dying, and the healthy twin was fine, I would just carry them both to term and deliver them together. So we packed up and headed over to the hospital. They took me in and after an hour on the ultrasound said that basically, I have identical twin boys that are sharing everything...placenta, sac etc. One doesn't have a heart, and so the healthy twin is transfusing blood to him through his umbilical cord and sustaining him that way. This is bad because the larger the small twin gets, the harder the healthy twin has to work pumping blood for him. So they want to sever them. I have an appointment on Friday at St. Mark's with a surgeon who wants to look at me and figure out whether now is a good time to sever them or not. If they do it too early, the healthy twin won't survive the surgery, and too late and he'll go into cardiac arrest from his heart working so hard to sustain both babies. I am at wit's end here, because I understand the small baby can't survive without his twin (and he also has some deformities, one of his legs hasn't formed properly, again, the only reason he has developed at all is because of his brother) and the healthy twin can't survive with the small twin still attached to them. I am just freaking out. The surgery would be to go in and send an electrical pulse through the cord to effectively cauterize and close it off. The small twin would still have to stay there and I couldn't deliver him until I delivered the healthy one. I still don;t have a good grasp of the risks and survival rate for the healthy twins, they said it a rare case, and the fact that my babies share everything makes it even rarer and nobody has any answers until I go to Salt Lake on Friday.

So that's what we know for now... I'll update as I get some more answers and know if we can do the surgery, if they need to monitor me, everything.