Diary of a Difficult Pregnancy published in Parents August 1997 © Laura Stavoe October. Week 11 of gestation. A Saturday. It’s 7:00 AM. My husband and I sit in the hallway of labor and delivery. A huge quilt, made by the St. Luke’s Auxiliary Club, hangs on the wall across from us. The paste squares contain appropriate symbols: bottles, binkies, swing, and babies of every skin tone that can be portrayed in felt. We don’t talk. Greg grips my hand. We listen to the sounds of birth being carried down the white-tiled hallways. Grunts, cries, screams, laughter, complaints, groans. Newborn babies crying. This will be our third ultrasound this month. The first was routine. “So far, so good,” Dr. Williams told us. We had been half surprised at that one, because we half expected two babies.  I had taken chlomid, a mild fertility drug, and even more so, because the year prior, Greg dreamt we had twin boys.  A week later, the sight of dark-red blood sent me into a panic. A second ultrasound revealed a healthy, beating heart. Ninety-five percent chance I’ll carry the baby to term, the on-call doctor said. A week later, more bleeding. This time, a third doctor says to come in first thing in the morning. She reminds me that this early, there’s not much that can be done. Either I’m miscarrying or I’m not. She shows up in wrinkled scrubs. I try to prepare myself for what I might see on the screen: my first baby in distress—or lifeless. I give up and decide to pray instead. The doctor squeezes cold gel on my curved belly. “A big 11 weeks. Are you sure about the date?”       I nod. “We’ve been charting my morning temps and taking pregnancy tests for months.”       “Twins maybe?”       I shake my head. “We’ve had two ultrasounds.” The image appears on the black-and-white screen and I struggle to find a reference point. “Is it okay?” I ask.       “The heart, here, is beating just fine,” she says. “So’s this one.”       She sees from our blank expressions that the information is not registering.       “One,” she holds the monitor on a flickering mass, a tiny heart, then points to another in the corner of her screen, “Two. Occasionally one hides.” Greg and I are still not convinced.       “I’ll take a picture for proof,” she says.       We leave the hospital different people. We walk briskly, laugh nervously, repeat “Twins!” over and over again. December. I feel heavy. My high school students ask me daily, “When are you due?” and shake their heads when I respond. “You’ll never make it,” they profess. They create bad metaphors about my belly. They offer to sharpen pencils, hand back papers, loan me calculators to figure grades so I don’t have to stand up to find mine.       I raced triathlons in my prior life. I always thought I’d be an active pregnant woman, hiking on crisp mornings and swimming at the Y. Instead I have an elevator key to get to my second-floor classroom, and I take naps in the faculty lounge during lunch. I eat frozen entrees for the first time in my life, because they’re easy and contain protein in the form of pressed meat. January 1995. Superbowl Sunday. After too much seven-layer bean dip, I sit in the reclining chair at my in-laws house and wonder whether I’m feeling gas or contractions. I don’t tell anyone, of course—how embarrassing. I figure it’s going to be a long haul if I suppose every ache and pain is signaling labor. I watch the rest of the game and try to relax my breathing.       On the way home I ask Greg to swing by the hospital. I know it’s silly, I tell him, but I want to make sure.       I see alarm in the labor nurse’s eyes as I write down that I’m in week 25. I don’t think it’s anything, I tell her. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. She tries to locate the babies’ heartbeats with fetal monitors. Occasionally we hear a flicker of sound, a moment of rhythm. But as soon as she belts the transducer to me as well, in order to monitor my contractions, it’s gone. “They’re still small,” she explains. “Plenty of room to move around.” Finally she gives up and focuses her attention on the fetal-monitor screen. At first it shows no contractions. Then the green line slopes upward three times in fifteen minutes. The nurse calls Dr. Williams who prescribes a shot of Terbutaline and tells me to stop working.       I want to tell the nurse, No I just came to confirm that it’s all in my head.       On the other side of the curtain, I hear the healthy heartbeat of a full-term baby magnified through the monitor. The nurses laugh with the woman whose water broke in a restaurant. The woman’s voice reveals anticipation bigger than a kid at Christmas. I am afraid that I will never experience such a moment. February 1. I’m at home trying to read, but the medication makes me too jittery. The last of the papers I should be grading are stacked up around me. one of it seems important enough to warrant my attention. Nothing on TV is dramatic enough to escape into. I keep one hand on my belly to feel for any tightening. I’m still counting three contractions an hour. I write down the time and length of each contraction in blue pen on the back of a baby- formula coupon. February 5. I’m back at labor and delivery for the third time in a week now, and no amount of Terbutaline is slowing the contractions. Once again, I’m hooked up to the fetal monitor. The green line slopes upward, marking a contraction every seven minutes.       An IV feeds magnesium sulfate into my veins. I try to recall its atomic weight and symbol from my high school periodic table. An hour later, the contractions are still coming every eight to nine minutes. The doctor increases the dosage to 2.5 grams, then, hours later, to 3. I try to imagine my one-pound babies. I try to pray them into patience, or readiness. I am afraid to remove my eyes from the fetal monitor keeping time with their beating hearts. February 6. Still pregnant. I wake up in the postpartum wing. The contractions have stopped.       I need the support of a nurse to stagger into the bathroom, pulling my IV behind me. She tells me most women can’t even walk on this much magnesium sulfate. The drug has alarming side effects. Small muscles that I took for granted have ceased working. I can’t focus my eyes to read or watch TV. I cant chew food and am resigned to Jello and mashed potatoes. At one point my jaw locks, then later releases. But I don’t care. My babies’ hearts are beating and my uterus has stopped trying to push them out. February 8. Home care. Linda, my home-care nurse, follows us home from the hospital. We set up camp on the couch. She gives me blood-pressure equipment, a scale to weigh myself each day so I can check for drastic changes, and graphs to chart my contractions, pulse, blood pressure, and weight. I can take one shower a day and get up to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, I’m to stay horizontal o this couch.       I spend my days doing out-of-character things. I cross-stitch, watch soaps, read escape novels.       Greg spends his days trying to keep our lives in working order. After work he buys groceries, cooks dinner, washes dishes. He brings me medications, glasses of milk, pins of lemon sorbet. He carries a cell phone everywhere he goes.       Friends call and I recount the hospital stay over and over. We just need to hang on for four more weeks. May 17 has become and ideal, rather than a realistic due date. We focus on incremental goals: Febrary 17 marks week 28, viability; week 30, healthy brain; week 32, nervous system; week 34, lungs. Still “high-tech” February. When I found out I was pregnant, I stopped drinking coffee and started eating more vegetables. I avoided aspirin and stayed away from secondhand smoke and microwaves. Now I’ve been on magnesium sulfate, weekly steroid shots for lung development, an occasional sedative to sow down contractions, and Terbutaline by injections, ingestion and subcutaneous syringe.       I’ve learned that subcutaneous means I stick a tiny needle into my thigh every other day and that needle injects a tiny tube under the skin. The tube is attached to a syringe full of medication. A pump the size of a pack of cigarettes distributes the medication continuously. Linda visits every week to drop off new syringes, which live in a plastic bag in the fridge next to the milk. She and Greg are my connections to the outside world.       I also monitor contractions twice a day. For an hour, I lie as still as possible so that the sensor won’t mistake my movement for contractions. The information is collected in a box. When the hour is up, I fit the box into a modem and call a nursing station in Atlanta. About 20 minutes later, a nurse with a southern accent calls back and tells me how many contractions I had and whether I need to increase the dosage. I can’ t believe how much someone in Atlanta knows about a belly on a couch in Boise. March, finally.       My mom comes to help and to visit from Chicago. We play an ongoing game of Scrabble. She lets me win, 10,456 to 9,230. March 8. Life.       We’ve passed the critical point. Our babies will live. We have the luxury of new fears. Will we be able to touch their fragile skin? Will they need machines to breathe? Will they have a sucking reflex?       Greg brings home two cribs. We start talking about the babies as though they are imminent rather than precarious. My friends throw a shower. A pastel mountain remains in the livingroom: sleepers, infant swings, two car seats, tiny bodysuits that snap on the bottom. I keep the mountain close to my couch so I can touch the soft items at will. I take things out of cellophane. These will be my babies’ clothes. Someday they will be spit up on and drooled in and outgrown. March 11. The threat of Magnesium Sulfate. My limit is four contractions an hour. I have six, then nine, then eight. I’m up until midnight remonitoring. Each time I am told to reset my pump to a higher dose, which is about like telling me to program a VCR. The nurse from Atlanta sounds sympathetic. “Mag wash, I’m afraid,” she says, meaning I’ll have to take more of the dreaded magnesium sulfate. She hangs up to call Dr. Williams.       By the time Dr. Williams calls back about an hour later, I’m down to four contractions. She recommends sleep. March 22. 32 Weeks.       An ultrasound shows the babies at about three pounds. I’m now allowed six contractions an hour. If I make it to week 34, I won’t need magnesium sulfate again. If I make it to 36, I can unplug this pump and get up off the couch. I’m amazed to think that this preterm labor started back in January, that I’ve held off this long. I should be grateful, but I want more. I want my babies to come home with me. March 28. At 3:15 AM I wake up to a steady beep. I check my syringe. It’s still full but the pump reads “error.” I try a new syringe; it makes no difference. I call the hospital and they contact the on-call home nurse, Teresa, who arrives about 45 minutes later, disheveled and sleepy. It’s four AM       I’m having contractions every few minutes. I worry that my babies will be born early due to technical difficulties. Teresa sets up a new pump and puts me back on Terbutaline. Then we sit and wait. Any lingering doubt that the medication wasn’t doing anything has disappeared; my contractions have slowed down.       Teresa leaves at dawn, and I drift back to sleep. April 1. When I eat, I place the warm plate on my giant belly and someone kicks it and makes it jump. I no longer feel alone. I talk to my uterus regularly. I read Winnie-the Pooh aloud and play Chopin and Back for the babies on the CD player. April 8. I feel like we’re in the clear now. In response, I’ve turned into a grouchy pregnant woman almost overnight. I’ m tired of sticking myself with tacks and flicking bubbles out of syringes; of monitoring everything: my blood pressure, my weight (my god, I’m huge), my uterus, my pulse. I’m tired of people in Seattle and Atlanta telling me what to do; of not being able to do simple things like get up and turn down the volume on the TV. I’m sick of bad novels and sewing in tiny squares. Mostly, I’m tired of being grateful to people for doing all the things for me that I’d rather do for myself. April 17. Midnight. 36 weeks. In one minute I can unplug the pump, let nature take its course, be a normal pregnant woman, waiting a normal delivery. I can walk around the house or the block. I can get the babies’ room ready, fold tiny clothes, organize drawers. I can get up to make myself a sandwich. I can do laundry. I can go outside and pick purple hyacinth, put it in my hair, and dance. But I might look kind of funny. April 18. Twelve hours after turning off the pump I earn the difference between latent and active phase labor. If one is the ebb and flow along the ocean shoreline, the other is a tsunami.       Overwhelming pain aside, labor and delivery go simply, as if nature is attempting to compensate. Both babies turn head-down at the last minute. I dilate from five to ten centimeters in under an hour. A whole entourage accompanies us into the delivery room: two OBs, two pediatricians, an anesthesiologist, the staff from neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The cleaning woman watches from the hall. Gabriel arrives first and weighs six pounds, nine ounces. Ten minutes and four pushes later, Dylan weighs in at five pounds, fourteen ounces. The NICU staff are the first to leave. Our sons aren’t only healthy; they are perfect. April 18, 1995. Almost midnight. Tomorrow I may learn there is still injustice in the world. But tonight, Greg and I sit in a still room, absent of beeping monitors. We each hold a newborn son wrapped in flannel. Dylan looks into my eyes and I know he knows—we made it through something big. The four of us are together, bathed in moonlight, listening to breath.