#3 - The Journey with Twins: Consultation with Dr. Chmait in LA
*Originally posted on November 22, 2016 - Dates changed so the Journey with Twins posts could all be found in one spot together.
On Friday, July 8, after we received the news that they were sending us to LA the following Monday for possible surgery, we sent our families the following video to summarize our potential diagnosis and treatment. Every time I watch it, I marvel afresh at how remarkable this surgery is and how far modern medicine has come!
On Saturday we scrambled to plan the whirlwind trip to LA and made arrangements for the girls to stay with Burke's parents for 2 days and my sister Cassie for another 2. Our Relief Society President, Renae Clark, called to check in on us and when she heard of our situation, she immediately spread the word through the ward, asking everyone to join in a ward fast on behalf of us and our babies. We were incredibly touched by this and it brought great comfort to know that our families, neighbors and friends would all be fasting and praying for us. We also learned our names had been put on the prayer roll of 5 separate LDS temples: Logan, St. George, Salt Lake City, Nauvoo (Illinois), and Cardston (Canada). We needed those prayers so badly and we felt them from across the hundreds and thousands of miles that separated us from all our loved ones.
On Sunday morning we drove to Parowan where we planned to attend the first hour of church at Alan and Marie's ward. We were going to leave the girls at church with A and M directly after sacrament meeting and start the long 7 hour drive to Los Angeles, but Daphne and Darcie were both having melt downs about us leaving. This ended up being a blessing, for if we had left 20 minutes earlier, we would have missed out on the following stunning surprise.
As we tried to comfort the girls, Burke noticed a missed call from a gentlemen in our ward and stepped outside to listen to the message. About 10 minutes later, he came in with cheeks red with emotion and informed me of a complete miracle. This amazing man in our ward had called to offer us a flight in his private jet to and from Los Angeles. He had heard about our situation and did not want me to have to travel such an extensive distance in my condition. When he learned that we would need to be in LA on Monday for the consultation, Tuesday for the surgery and wouldn't be discharged from the hospital until Wednesday, he called his pilot and worked it out for him to stay in LA for the 3 days so he could fly us out and take us home as well! Burke and I were completely floored. I had no idea that this unassuming neighbor was so successful (let alone that he had a private airplane!) and in a position to be so generous. I began to cry as Burke told me that when he offered to pay him, he immediately declined any kind of reimbursement and only required that we not tell anyone that he had provided this service for us, because he didn't like the idea of anyone giving him unwanted praise. Talk about absolute humility and charity. In amazement and gratitude, we took him up on the offer.
He asked when our appointment was (3:00 on Monday) and said, "Ok, it takes just about an hour to get to LA and we can get you as close to Pasadena as possible, so it should only take you about 20 minutes to drive from the airport. Let's meet at my hanger in Cedar City at 1:00 tomorrow." Again, we were flabbergasted and so grateful for the extra day and a half to spend with our girls to calm their anxieties and our own.
On Monday, July 11, we met at our hero's private hanger. He showed up in Wranglers, boots and a baseball cap, dusty from being out on a tractor all morning and just as down to earth as they come. He humbly brushed aside our sincere gratitude and did everything to make us feel comfortable and safe. The whole experience of watching the plane preparations was so foreign to us and so much fun to observe! It added an element of excitement to our trip that eased the intense anxiety we were shouldering and was especially thrilling for Burke. He got to sit in the co-pilot seat and listen to the air traffic dialogue throughout the flight. Every time I glanced up from my book he had a huge grin on his face and it made me so happy to see him so excited. However, as I am afraid of heights and flying, I had a bit of trepidation at being airborne in such a tiny craft. Our cheerful pilot, Jeremy, had brought along his adorable 7-year-old daughter, Bridgette, who he planned to take to Disneyland and the beach while we were in surgery. She cracked me up with how nonchalant she was with the whole experience, clearly very comfortable in the sky. When the turbulence picked up and I started practicing my Lamaze breathing (so I wouldn't have a panic attack or go into labor!), she just said in a bored voice, "Are we there yet Daddy?" I was so jealous of her fearlessness!
We flew into a tiny airport just 20 minutes outside of Pasadena and "parked" next to several dozen other private planes. As we climbed out, an attendant came up and confirmed our rental car that we had reserved ahead of time. Less than two minutes later, another attendant drove up our rental car as we were getting our bags out of the back of the plane, put them in the trunk and sent us on our way! Burke and I agreed the ease and fluidity of that travel experience was mind blowing to both of us. If only we could all afford to travel that way!
With the time change (we're an hour ahead of California), we had enough time to grab a quick burger and drive to the LA Fetal Therapy office at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. We checked in at 3 and were quickly called back where we met Katie, our ultrasound tech who was pretty much the Nascar Driver of ultrasounds. She wasn't very social as she whizzed around my belly, entering in measurements in rapid fire and printing out a thread of ultrasound pictures from the machine that by the end probably stretched at least 10 feet long, but folded up on itself in a giant accordion of heart waves and precious baby outlines. Funny how she took a thousand images and in the coming hurricane I never thought to ask for a single one of them.
After some time Dr. Chmait came in, engaging and likable. He did an examination of his own and then asked us to join him in his office with his head nurse Kris. The office bookshelf was overflowing with figurines from Star Wars to Back to the Future characters. We shot the breeze for a moment, joking about how we referred to one of our doctors as "Doc Brown", similar to the sporadic genius on Back to the Future. We had several good laughs as I subconsciously sought to keep things light, knowing heaviness was soon to come.
Turning to the business at hand, Dr. Chmait showed us a slideshow on his computer, explaining again the nature of shared blood flow between twins sharing one placenta (see previous post HERE for a more detailed explanation or the LA Fetal Therapy Website HERE) and the problem that can result with Twin Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS) where one twin receives too much blood and the other receives too little. We nodded. We had heard all this before and done our own research into TTTS. That was why we were here, to qualify for the surgery and to save the babies from this now correctable condition with Dr. Chmait's remarkable laser surgery. However, to our surprise, he didn't stop there.
"Mr. and Mrs. Adams, I'm sorry to tell you, but after examining your babies, we are fairly certain they do not suffer from TTTS." He went on, "There might be a tiny bit of TTTS going on, but the primary reason your Baby A is struggling is due to a condition called Selective Intrauterine Growth Restriction or SIUGR. Essentially what has happened is upon conception, your babies' umbilical cords attached to the placenta in favorable and unfavorable positions. Your baby B tapped right into the center of the placenta and is receiving all the prime nutrients and blood, while your Baby A's umbilical cord formed on the bottom portion of the placenta meaning that all he is receiving is the dregs, the leftovers, insufficient nutrients for proper growth and development."
As we processed this new information, Dr. Chmait paused and put his fingers together as he searched for the right words. "I need you to understand, your Baby A is very, very sick." Here he paused again before saying, "And in this case, surgery may not be able to help him."
I felt a bit in shock at this point. I had never stopped to consider that we may run into a scenario where our baby couldn't be helped. Of course there was always a churning fear in the pit of my stomach that he may be in grave danger, but once we had been told of the laser surgery, I felt certain that we would eventually end up right here, in this office, with a surgery plan and the end result of two healthy baby boys. Weren't we living in the 21st century with miraculous treatments just like this one? Couldn't they do revolutionary procedures now that could save infants as young as 25 weeks, the age of our babies right then?
Yet, the bad news continued. As Dr. Cmait shared new information, it began to sink in just how endangered our babies really were. He reminded us that even without the TTTS diagnosis, when twins pass blood back and forth through their interconnected blood vessels in the placenta, their fates are inseparable from one another. If one twin passes away for any reason, the surviving twin will continue to pump blood into the dead fetus without receiving any blood in return which can result in severe brain damage or, in most cases, death.
Dr Chmait reiterated, "There is nothing that can be done for Baby A's cord placement and the surgery may not be able to help him improve in his development. However, by severing the blood vessels between the two, the surgery may be able to save your Baby B from brain damage or death in the likely scenario that your Baby A passes away in the coming days or weeks."
To have it spelled out like that. To have the words, "your baby" and "death" in the same sentence was too much. Up until then I had remained quite composed. Now it felt hard to breathe and the tears spilled over, hot with despair. Yet, as my thoughts and heart reeled, there came to mind, like a bright flash of blazing of hope, the phrase from Burke's priesthood blessing given over 3 months prior: whole and healthy. The babies will come whole and healthy. I latched onto this promise like a life line, swallowed hard and asked, "What can be done?"
Dr. Chmait took a deep breathe and began to spell out our options. "Essentially, we have 4 options. The first would be to terminate the pregnancy."
Burke and I both shook our heads immediately in horror. "No. No, of course not. That is not an option."
Dr. Chmait nodded and continued, "The second would be to tie off the umbilical cord of your Baby A, terminating only his life and not his brothers. Although option two would need to be performed at another facility as we do not assist in this procedure here due to ethical reasons."
Again we instantly replied in the negative.
"The third option," Dr. Cmait went on, "would be to perform the surgery. Again, this would not necessarily help your Baby A unless if there was a slight case of TTTS happening. In fact, it could possibly even push Baby A over the edge more quickly. The purpose of the surgery would be to sever the babies's fates from one another, giving your Baby B a fighting chance. The hope would then be that if both babies survived, following the surgery you could time a premature c-section before your Baby A passed away, but with long enough gestational development to not endanger your Baby B with serious life-long health problems."
I felt like this was another horrendous blow. If we chose the surgery we could hopefully save our Baby B from danger, but we ran the risk of straining both babies beyond their strength and ending in one or two demises. How could we choose one baby over the other? How could we knowingly further endanger both of their lives?
After another breathe Dr. Chmait finished with, "And finally, your fourth option would be to do nothing. Return to Utah and continue to be monitored. You could be admitted to the hospital for the next several months with constant monitoring and attempt to intervene at the perfect time before Baby A passes while waiting long enough for ideal gestational development for Baby B. But I must be honest, we are horrible at predicting the exact time a baby may pass and often intervene too early or too late."
We sat in stunned silence for a moment, Burke and I clutching one another's hands while we tried to decide what could possibly be the right choice in this horrible situation. I felt it was impossible to make such a huge decision without serious fasting, prayer and discussion with one another. Knowing there is a temple for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Los Angeles, Burke and I had brought our temple bags with us, hopeful that we would have an opportunity to attend a session while we were in California. In that moment, that is all I could think to do. Get to the temple and seek answers from our wise and loving Heavenly Father.
In a quaking voice I said, "Dr. Chmait, in the video about the laser surgery on your website, I noticed at one point that you said, 'All we can do now is pray.' I don't know if you are a man of faith, but we are." Here I broke down crying as I tried to explain our desire to attend our temple and seek answers from God.
To my surprise, Dr. Chmait exclaimed, "I think there is one of your temples right by my house!" Turning to his computer, he began searching the web for Mormon temples, along with his address. He continued, "There are tons of your Mormon people in my neighborhood! In fact, I always tell my three teenage boys that they need to be friends with the Mormons because they are all the good kids!" As it turned out, he was just around the corner from an LDS stake center and the temple was a good 45 minutes away, closed on Mondays and not open until 6 AM the next morning. With possible surgery scheduled at 7 AM the next morning, that wasn't going to work, but Dr. Chmait was adamant that we take all the time we needed to, even pushing the surgery back to Thursday if we wanted time to go to the temple. However, with our airplane pilot needing to return to Utah on Wednesday, we felt that if we were going to do the surgery, we needed to do it in the morning.
At this point it was already nearing 5:30 PM. Dr. Chmait had spent well over an hour talking with us and we felt badly to keep him and his staff from their families, but we also knew we needed a moment to decide. They were very gracious and told us to take all the time we needed. Burke and I went into a conference room where I wept. In the seven years of our marriage, I have only seen Burke tear up a handful of times, but I have never seen actual tears fall. Perhaps in order to be strong for me, he continued to blink back tears as he held me tight. We sat and prayed mightily together, pleading for the spirit to guide us to make the right choice. After a long prayer, we sat in silence for just a moment before I dried my tears and said, "I will not feel right until we try everything in our power to save the babies. We need to do the surgery. Miracles still happen and Heavenly Father will get these babies here whole and healthy, just as he promised." Burke agreed and we felt a calming peace come over us as we decided to move forward with the scheduled surgery.
Dr. Chmait reminded us that even if we got into the hospital in the morning and changed our minds, he would understand. He had declined to give us advice on which scenario would be best for the babies as both were highly complicated and risky with similar odds. He felt in our case he could estimate a 65% chance that at least Baby B would survive the surgery and about a 50% chance that Baby A would as well. However, once we told him we had decided to do the surgery he was optimistic, encouraging and kind.
As we left the office, I tried to hold it together. We had planned on going out to eat that night with our dear friends Josie and Rick Kelly (Josie and I became friends when we were 12 in 6th grade orchestra and she has been one of my best friends ever since) whom we hadn't seen in 2 years, but the appointment had taken over 3 hours by the time we left. Josie was kind enough to still invite us to her home and I was grateful to have somewhere to go to distract us from the tremendous upheaval of our situation. We checked into the Marriott Hotel up the road from the hospital and then drove about 30 minutes to Sherman Oaks to see the Kellys.
On Friday, July 8, after we received the news that they were sending us to LA the following Monday for possible surgery, we sent our families the following video to summarize our potential diagnosis and treatment. Every time I watch it, I marvel afresh at how remarkable this surgery is and how far modern medicine has come!
On Saturday we scrambled to plan the whirlwind trip to LA and made arrangements for the girls to stay with Burke's parents for 2 days and my sister Cassie for another 2. Our Relief Society President, Renae Clark, called to check in on us and when she heard of our situation, she immediately spread the word through the ward, asking everyone to join in a ward fast on behalf of us and our babies. We were incredibly touched by this and it brought great comfort to know that our families, neighbors and friends would all be fasting and praying for us. We also learned our names had been put on the prayer roll of 5 separate LDS temples: Logan, St. George, Salt Lake City, Nauvoo (Illinois), and Cardston (Canada). We needed those prayers so badly and we felt them from across the hundreds and thousands of miles that separated us from all our loved ones.
On Sunday morning we drove to Parowan where we planned to attend the first hour of church at Alan and Marie's ward. We were going to leave the girls at church with A and M directly after sacrament meeting and start the long 7 hour drive to Los Angeles, but Daphne and Darcie were both having melt downs about us leaving. This ended up being a blessing, for if we had left 20 minutes earlier, we would have missed out on the following stunning surprise.
As we tried to comfort the girls, Burke noticed a missed call from a gentlemen in our ward and stepped outside to listen to the message. About 10 minutes later, he came in with cheeks red with emotion and informed me of a complete miracle. This amazing man in our ward had called to offer us a flight in his private jet to and from Los Angeles. He had heard about our situation and did not want me to have to travel such an extensive distance in my condition. When he learned that we would need to be in LA on Monday for the consultation, Tuesday for the surgery and wouldn't be discharged from the hospital until Wednesday, he called his pilot and worked it out for him to stay in LA for the 3 days so he could fly us out and take us home as well! Burke and I were completely floored. I had no idea that this unassuming neighbor was so successful (let alone that he had a private airplane!) and in a position to be so generous. I began to cry as Burke told me that when he offered to pay him, he immediately declined any kind of reimbursement and only required that we not tell anyone that he had provided this service for us, because he didn't like the idea of anyone giving him unwanted praise. Talk about absolute humility and charity. In amazement and gratitude, we took him up on the offer.
He asked when our appointment was (3:00 on Monday) and said, "Ok, it takes just about an hour to get to LA and we can get you as close to Pasadena as possible, so it should only take you about 20 minutes to drive from the airport. Let's meet at my hanger in Cedar City at 1:00 tomorrow." Again, we were flabbergasted and so grateful for the extra day and a half to spend with our girls to calm their anxieties and our own.
On Monday, July 11, we met at our hero's private hanger. He showed up in Wranglers, boots and a baseball cap, dusty from being out on a tractor all morning and just as down to earth as they come. He humbly brushed aside our sincere gratitude and did everything to make us feel comfortable and safe. The whole experience of watching the plane preparations was so foreign to us and so much fun to observe! It added an element of excitement to our trip that eased the intense anxiety we were shouldering and was especially thrilling for Burke. He got to sit in the co-pilot seat and listen to the air traffic dialogue throughout the flight. Every time I glanced up from my book he had a huge grin on his face and it made me so happy to see him so excited. However, as I am afraid of heights and flying, I had a bit of trepidation at being airborne in such a tiny craft. Our cheerful pilot, Jeremy, had brought along his adorable 7-year-old daughter, Bridgette, who he planned to take to Disneyland and the beach while we were in surgery. She cracked me up with how nonchalant she was with the whole experience, clearly very comfortable in the sky. When the turbulence picked up and I started practicing my Lamaze breathing (so I wouldn't have a panic attack or go into labor!), she just said in a bored voice, "Are we there yet Daddy?" I was so jealous of her fearlessness!
We flew into a tiny airport just 20 minutes outside of Pasadena and "parked" next to several dozen other private planes. As we climbed out, an attendant came up and confirmed our rental car that we had reserved ahead of time. Less than two minutes later, another attendant drove up our rental car as we were getting our bags out of the back of the plane, put them in the trunk and sent us on our way! Burke and I agreed the ease and fluidity of that travel experience was mind blowing to both of us. If only we could all afford to travel that way!
Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, California.
With the time change (we're an hour ahead of California), we had enough time to grab a quick burger and drive to the LA Fetal Therapy office at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. We checked in at 3 and were quickly called back where we met Katie, our ultrasound tech who was pretty much the Nascar Driver of ultrasounds. She wasn't very social as she whizzed around my belly, entering in measurements in rapid fire and printing out a thread of ultrasound pictures from the machine that by the end probably stretched at least 10 feet long, but folded up on itself in a giant accordion of heart waves and precious baby outlines. Funny how she took a thousand images and in the coming hurricane I never thought to ask for a single one of them.
After some time Dr. Chmait came in, engaging and likable. He did an examination of his own and then asked us to join him in his office with his head nurse Kris. The office bookshelf was overflowing with figurines from Star Wars to Back to the Future characters. We shot the breeze for a moment, joking about how we referred to one of our doctors as "Doc Brown", similar to the sporadic genius on Back to the Future. We had several good laughs as I subconsciously sought to keep things light, knowing heaviness was soon to come.
Turning to the business at hand, Dr. Chmait showed us a slideshow on his computer, explaining again the nature of shared blood flow between twins sharing one placenta (see previous post HERE for a more detailed explanation or the LA Fetal Therapy Website HERE) and the problem that can result with Twin Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS) where one twin receives too much blood and the other receives too little. We nodded. We had heard all this before and done our own research into TTTS. That was why we were here, to qualify for the surgery and to save the babies from this now correctable condition with Dr. Chmait's remarkable laser surgery. However, to our surprise, he didn't stop there.
"Mr. and Mrs. Adams, I'm sorry to tell you, but after examining your babies, we are fairly certain they do not suffer from TTTS." He went on, "There might be a tiny bit of TTTS going on, but the primary reason your Baby A is struggling is due to a condition called Selective Intrauterine Growth Restriction or SIUGR. Essentially what has happened is upon conception, your babies' umbilical cords attached to the placenta in favorable and unfavorable positions. Your baby B tapped right into the center of the placenta and is receiving all the prime nutrients and blood, while your Baby A's umbilical cord formed on the bottom portion of the placenta meaning that all he is receiving is the dregs, the leftovers, insufficient nutrients for proper growth and development."
As we processed this new information, Dr. Chmait paused and put his fingers together as he searched for the right words. "I need you to understand, your Baby A is very, very sick." Here he paused again before saying, "And in this case, surgery may not be able to help him."
I felt a bit in shock at this point. I had never stopped to consider that we may run into a scenario where our baby couldn't be helped. Of course there was always a churning fear in the pit of my stomach that he may be in grave danger, but once we had been told of the laser surgery, I felt certain that we would eventually end up right here, in this office, with a surgery plan and the end result of two healthy baby boys. Weren't we living in the 21st century with miraculous treatments just like this one? Couldn't they do revolutionary procedures now that could save infants as young as 25 weeks, the age of our babies right then?
Yet, the bad news continued. As Dr. Cmait shared new information, it began to sink in just how endangered our babies really were. He reminded us that even without the TTTS diagnosis, when twins pass blood back and forth through their interconnected blood vessels in the placenta, their fates are inseparable from one another. If one twin passes away for any reason, the surviving twin will continue to pump blood into the dead fetus without receiving any blood in return which can result in severe brain damage or, in most cases, death.
Dr Chmait reiterated, "There is nothing that can be done for Baby A's cord placement and the surgery may not be able to help him improve in his development. However, by severing the blood vessels between the two, the surgery may be able to save your Baby B from brain damage or death in the likely scenario that your Baby A passes away in the coming days or weeks."
To have it spelled out like that. To have the words, "your baby" and "death" in the same sentence was too much. Up until then I had remained quite composed. Now it felt hard to breathe and the tears spilled over, hot with despair. Yet, as my thoughts and heart reeled, there came to mind, like a bright flash of blazing of hope, the phrase from Burke's priesthood blessing given over 3 months prior: whole and healthy. The babies will come whole and healthy. I latched onto this promise like a life line, swallowed hard and asked, "What can be done?"
Dr. Chmait took a deep breathe and began to spell out our options. "Essentially, we have 4 options. The first would be to terminate the pregnancy."
Burke and I both shook our heads immediately in horror. "No. No, of course not. That is not an option."
Dr. Chmait nodded and continued, "The second would be to tie off the umbilical cord of your Baby A, terminating only his life and not his brothers. Although option two would need to be performed at another facility as we do not assist in this procedure here due to ethical reasons."
Again we instantly replied in the negative.
"The third option," Dr. Cmait went on, "would be to perform the surgery. Again, this would not necessarily help your Baby A unless if there was a slight case of TTTS happening. In fact, it could possibly even push Baby A over the edge more quickly. The purpose of the surgery would be to sever the babies's fates from one another, giving your Baby B a fighting chance. The hope would then be that if both babies survived, following the surgery you could time a premature c-section before your Baby A passed away, but with long enough gestational development to not endanger your Baby B with serious life-long health problems."
I felt like this was another horrendous blow. If we chose the surgery we could hopefully save our Baby B from danger, but we ran the risk of straining both babies beyond their strength and ending in one or two demises. How could we choose one baby over the other? How could we knowingly further endanger both of their lives?
After another breathe Dr. Chmait finished with, "And finally, your fourth option would be to do nothing. Return to Utah and continue to be monitored. You could be admitted to the hospital for the next several months with constant monitoring and attempt to intervene at the perfect time before Baby A passes while waiting long enough for ideal gestational development for Baby B. But I must be honest, we are horrible at predicting the exact time a baby may pass and often intervene too early or too late."
We sat in stunned silence for a moment, Burke and I clutching one another's hands while we tried to decide what could possibly be the right choice in this horrible situation. I felt it was impossible to make such a huge decision without serious fasting, prayer and discussion with one another. Knowing there is a temple for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Los Angeles, Burke and I had brought our temple bags with us, hopeful that we would have an opportunity to attend a session while we were in California. In that moment, that is all I could think to do. Get to the temple and seek answers from our wise and loving Heavenly Father.
In a quaking voice I said, "Dr. Chmait, in the video about the laser surgery on your website, I noticed at one point that you said, 'All we can do now is pray.' I don't know if you are a man of faith, but we are." Here I broke down crying as I tried to explain our desire to attend our temple and seek answers from God.
To my surprise, Dr. Chmait exclaimed, "I think there is one of your temples right by my house!" Turning to his computer, he began searching the web for Mormon temples, along with his address. He continued, "There are tons of your Mormon people in my neighborhood! In fact, I always tell my three teenage boys that they need to be friends with the Mormons because they are all the good kids!" As it turned out, he was just around the corner from an LDS stake center and the temple was a good 45 minutes away, closed on Mondays and not open until 6 AM the next morning. With possible surgery scheduled at 7 AM the next morning, that wasn't going to work, but Dr. Chmait was adamant that we take all the time we needed to, even pushing the surgery back to Thursday if we wanted time to go to the temple. However, with our airplane pilot needing to return to Utah on Wednesday, we felt that if we were going to do the surgery, we needed to do it in the morning.
At this point it was already nearing 5:30 PM. Dr. Chmait had spent well over an hour talking with us and we felt badly to keep him and his staff from their families, but we also knew we needed a moment to decide. They were very gracious and told us to take all the time we needed. Burke and I went into a conference room where I wept. In the seven years of our marriage, I have only seen Burke tear up a handful of times, but I have never seen actual tears fall. Perhaps in order to be strong for me, he continued to blink back tears as he held me tight. We sat and prayed mightily together, pleading for the spirit to guide us to make the right choice. After a long prayer, we sat in silence for just a moment before I dried my tears and said, "I will not feel right until we try everything in our power to save the babies. We need to do the surgery. Miracles still happen and Heavenly Father will get these babies here whole and healthy, just as he promised." Burke agreed and we felt a calming peace come over us as we decided to move forward with the scheduled surgery.
Dr. Chmait reminded us that even if we got into the hospital in the morning and changed our minds, he would understand. He had declined to give us advice on which scenario would be best for the babies as both were highly complicated and risky with similar odds. He felt in our case he could estimate a 65% chance that at least Baby B would survive the surgery and about a 50% chance that Baby A would as well. However, once we told him we had decided to do the surgery he was optimistic, encouraging and kind.
As we left the office, I tried to hold it together. We had planned on going out to eat that night with our dear friends Josie and Rick Kelly (Josie and I became friends when we were 12 in 6th grade orchestra and she has been one of my best friends ever since) whom we hadn't seen in 2 years, but the appointment had taken over 3 hours by the time we left. Josie was kind enough to still invite us to her home and I was grateful to have somewhere to go to distract us from the tremendous upheaval of our situation. We checked into the Marriott Hotel up the road from the hospital and then drove about 30 minutes to Sherman Oaks to see the Kellys.
I purposely turned this picture sepia toned so you can't see how horribly red my face is from crying my brains out. I think this is the best picture from the pregnancy that shows just how enormous my belly was getting at only 25 weeks gestation, but measuring around 34 weeks.
As we drove, we sent out a message to our families to let them know we were on for surgery, but didn't go into details about the gut wrenching experience we were going through. We called our parents to tell them the details of our dilemma and to request once again to be kept in their prayers.
At Josie's apartment, it was delightful to see her amazing son Forrest (who has a rare form of hemophilia) zipping around on a balance bike. The last time we had seen him, he wasn't even a year old and Josie and Rick had lived in a constant state of fear that he would injure himself, resulting in internal or external bleeding that could not be stopped. To see how confident they have all become in their ability to handle his disease and still live a happy life as a family was so encouraging to me. Delicious food and the company of my wonderful friend helped to calm me to the point that I was no longer on the verge of tears at all times.
Our visit went too quickly and we soon headed back to the hotel where we tried to rest (somewhat unsuccessfully) and prepare for the big day ahead. I was required to fast from food and water from 10 o'clock on, which is no easy task for a gigantic twin pregger! All too soon it was time to go. How very grateful I felt to have my Burkie by my side, steadying my fears with his confidence that all would turn out right in the end.
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