Part of the Plan

If all goes well, I’ll start inpatient monitoring mid-March. The monitoring will entail non-stress test monitoring and sonograms on the twins for so many hours a day with the expectation that I could be moved into an OR and ready for a c-section within minutes of discovering an issue. We pray to not deliver until 32 weeks which would be mid-May, but we have to be prepared since the babies could live at 24 weeks outside the womb, and it could get a little dicey inside the womb. Inpatient monitoring is said to have vastly changed what mono-mono outcomes can look like, so as hard as this will be, I’m glad it's available.

The prep to get to inpatient monitoring is obviously going to be strenuous, so I’m starting with what I anticipate being a huge challenge: getting Wren to come visit me.


See, Wren doesn’t like hospitals. I have no idea where the fear came from, but it started early. You know how everyone has that adorable picture of their kids together right after the sibling is born? We have these:

It’s not that Wren didn’t like Sam. She didn’t like that he was in a hospital. She wanted to take him home. And me, forget it. I was hooked to an IV tube, a catheter, and apparently looked like I had just survived a horror flick attack, because after being separated from me for the first time ever, she still would not come near me. She wanted to, but something about all the hospital apparatuses kept her a fair distance from my bed. So, I begged the nurse to take my catheter tube and IV out while Wren was in the hall, and then when she came back I was standing up a small distance from the bed, as far as I could move less than eight hours after being cut open to pull a small person out of me. Still, she wanted nothing to do with it. She cried and yelled in her two-year-old voice that she loved me as she ran out the door begging to leave. It was overwhelmingly sad and I think part of the reason I convinced the hospital staff to let me bust out of that place early. I wanted to be with both of my kids, and it was obvious Wren was not coming back.

We can’t spend eight weeks like that. My plan is for Wren and I to take a girls' day tour of the hospital, let her ask her questions, see what kind of room I’ll be in, and then go home and begin discussing how she will decorate it to her liking. I’m guessing lots of pink. I want it to be a place everyone is comfy because I have to live there, and me living happily involves having my family around.  Even if I’m surrounded by Pepto-Bismol pink everything Wren can drag in there, I will be content as long as all the major players in my life are good.