Isabel and Winter's twin pregnancy and birth story

by Roslaie
(Minnesota, USA)

Hi, I'm Rosalie. I have four beautiful girls. First to understand more about my story just need to let you all know that in my first pregnancy I had severe pre-eclampsia and my daughter was born at 30 weeks. My second pregnancy thankfully was perfect and she went full term. When I found out that I was pregnant with twins I was shocked as you can imagine. I had no idea that twins ran in my family, it skipped a couple generations.

I was still at risk of getting pre-e again so my doctor was keeping a very close eye on me. I knew all of the symptoms being that I went through it with my first. Well when I was about 29 weeks I started seeing spots in my eyes, and was getting huge blind spots. So I went into the hospital to get it checked out more. I live in a very small town north of Minneapolis and the hospital doesn't have a NICU at all and they can't even handle babies born before 35 weeks, if they are they have to be transported to the UofM hospital.

Well they did a couple blood tests, and checked my urine for protein. I had some protein in my urine and my doctor decided to keep me overnight to keep a 24 hour sample to do a more intensive test. The next day they decided to give me steroid shots to help their lungs just in case they had to transport me to deliver. That night they decided to just do that. I had to be transported an hour down by ambulance to the cities to the university hospital. I get there and right away they get me started on magnesium, it helps with the pre-e because if it gets too bad it can cause seizures. They were very confused though because with my first daughter my blood pressure was EXTREMELY high, with the twins it was pretty normal. Yet my vision was really bad, I couldn't see out of half of my left eye and spots in my right eye. They were very concerned so I had to be transported by ambulance the next morning to the other side of the campus to the eye specialists to get tests ran.

They were concerned that since my blood pressure was just fine, yet I was having so many vision problems that they wanted me to get a MRI to make sure I didn't have a brain tumor or even a clot in my brain. Yeah, I totally freaked out then. I went for the MRI and everything came back normal, thank god. They decided that I had HELLP Syndrome and Pre-eclampsia and decided to deliver the babies the next morning. The doctors and nurses were great. I couldn't be more thankful for such a great team.

Isabel was 3lbs 3oz and 15 inches, Winter was 2lbs 11oz and 14 1/2 inches. They were breathing fine on their own the first couple of days. After a while though Winter needed help for a couple of days then she was fine, same for Isabel. They ran into a couple problems along the way. My milk took a couple of days to come good so they gave them formula. It didn't do too well for Winter. Her stomach descended and was having some problems, so they had to give her antibiotics and stop feeding her for 10 days. Isabel had the same problem but it wasn't as bad. After that they were strictly on breast milk.

I live an hour away so I am very thankful that they have rooms there for the parents to stay in. It was hard to leave my other girls, but I stayed down there with the twins Sunday through Thursday to pump and eventually practice breast feeding. Towards the end they were doing fantastic. They just had to work on eating a certain amount of milk every feeding. Towards the end they have another set of rooms that parents stay in for a couple of days with the babies before they are discharged.

Isabel was discharged on a Tuesday afternoon. Winter was having some problems with keeping dsating and not eating as much. I stayed up with her almost all night holding her because she was having a hard time. At 6am I had one of the nurse practitioners come in and wake me to tell me that Winter was having some problems and that they were going to take her back into the NICU into the isolation room. I was freaking out it scared me so bad. They ran tests and turns out she had caught the flu.

She was in the NICU for another 5 days. That was the hardest thing for me to do, take one baby home and leave her there. I'm very very thankful for the doctors and nurses there. They are now almost 8 months old and doing great. They're gaining weight and growing like they should be.