Pregnancy
After I Miscarried Twins, I Conceived Twins Again
Alex Remon was a first time mother when she conceived with her husband at the age of 35. After being diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), an imbalance in female sex hormones, getting pregnant was proving to be rather challenging even with IVF. The couple never made it to the egg retrieval process in the initial go round, as her body ejected the eggs. After another unsuccessful frozen round, Alex was delighted to learn that she was pregnant with twins.
Thirty-six hours before going into labor, the mother was told that she and her daughters were “remarkably healthy.” After a slew of tests for gestational diabetes, her doctor told her that everyone’s health looked promising. But as the delivery progressed, Alex was informed that her babies had an infection and would not survive 36 hours upon being delivered. The mother was told that if she did not abort the pregnancy, the infection would kill her as well as her daughters. She remembers the experience as “a race to see which three of us would die first.”
“I wanted to do nothing and just die with them,” she tells Mommyish. “After several hours of begging, I finally conceded to the wishes of my husband and agreed to abort the girls before they took me with them. I kept asking them to look for heartbeats again somewhat hoping they wouldn’t find any and the girls would be gone. Decision made for me. But they just hung on and forced me to make the decision to end their lives prematurely by mere hours only.”
Alex recalls her pregnancy as “perfect” up until that moment and longed to go back to her 17-week checkup when all was determined fine.
Three months later, the couple tried their luck with a frozen round of embryos. In the months following, more rounds of IVF ensued. But the fertility clinic determined a problem with Alex’s weight, ultimately asking her to lose 19 lbs with dieting. Following another round of IVF nearly a year to her miscarriage, Alex discovered that she was pregnant.
After receiving a positive beta pregnancy test four days after an embryo transfer, she had an inkling that she was carrying twins again. At five and a half weeks, Alex experienced some bleeding that resulted in an ultrasound confirming two fetuses. Ten weeks later, she and her husband learned that they were girls — again.
“I needed at least one girl,” she remembers. “With the first set, we had thought they were both girls, but the second one was shy so we weren’t absolutely sure until we lost them. But I had already fallen in love with one girl and had grown attached. So when we went in to learn the genders of the second set, I needed one of them to be a girl. I cried so hard when they confirmed the first girl. It was a relief, it was just overwhelming. I had gotten her back! And then they confirmed the second girl and it was just shock. The fact that it was twins a second time was unbelievable enough, but the same gender combination? Absolute shock.”
Alex then recalls experiencing a surge of fear and a sort of deja vu that she would lose her girls a second time. Despite she and her husband’s primary reaction of “we got them back,” her pregnancy was completely anxiety-ridden. The mother endured “bad” and “violent” bleeding for the first half of her pregnancy. Twice she found herself in the emergency room. In one instance, she suffered projectile bleeding. She remained on modified bed rest for the entire pregnancy, sometimes afraid of using the bathroom for fear of miscarrying. Alex and her husband eventually purchased a fetal doppler and checked for two heart beats every night.
