One, Two... Three?

This morning, in the shower, I was shaving my legs in anticipation of my ultrasound.  (I always figure it’s a good idea not to give the doctor rug burn as he comes at me with the wand.)  I was distracted and nervous and using a new razor, and cut my ankle – not just a nick, but one of those cuts that seems to take out a whole chunk of skin and bleeds forever.  Gross.

It felt like a bad omen.  All I could think about was how if this was a movie, that blood would symbolize the fact that I was about to get bad news.  Needless to say, I was feeling a little dark.

And then Henry walked into the bathroom. “I feel like we’re going to get good news today!” he said.  I showed him my foot.  “Well, that’s the bad thing, and the ultrasound will be the good thing,” he said, WAY too cheerfully for how nervous I felt.

As we drove to the doctor, my dad, my mom, and my cousin Tracy (who is having her baby tomorrow) all texted me.  WHY had I decided to tell my cousins, again?  It just felt like more people to disappoint if we saw something bad on the ultrasound.  (For what it’s worth, I had told them about my pregnancy, but spilling the ultrasound news was all my mom’s doing).  Tracy told me that, at 6 weeks exactly, I should be able to see a heartbeat.  Great, more pressure for my uterus.

We waited nervously in the waiting room, and then got called back to the ultrasound room.  I barely had my pants off before the doctor walked into the room.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Nervous.  I was a little bit scared by that last hcg number.”

“Why, because you think it might be twins?”

“No!  I’d love twins!  Because it slowed down so much.”

“Oh it wasn’t that bad.”

And thus ended the saga of the slow-rising beta (though not before Henry and the doctor ganged up and did a little teasing about my propensity for Googling).

“What can we expect to see on the ultrasound?” I asked the doctor.  I’d done my Googling, of course, but wanted to hear what he expected so that I wouldn’t freak out if we saw less than what I was hoping for.

“We should see a gestational sac and a yolk sac.  Maybe a heartbeat,” he said.  I laid back on the table, forcing myself to acknowledge that if we didn’t see a heartbeat, it didn’t mean anything awful.  We only MIGHT see one.

A second later the ultrasound wand was inside of me, and up on the screen appeared…. TWO gestational sacs!  TWINS!

The doctor set to work measuring the more visible one, and then we could see it: the tiny little flicker of a heartbeat.  So much relief, so much happiness, I teared up.  It was even strong enough that the doctor was able to pick up the sound of it with the ultrasound wand; we couldn’t hear anything, but we could see the little sound waves, pulsing at a perfect pace of 103 beats per minute.  Everything measured exactly right.

Then he moved up to the other gestational sac.

“I don’t want to alarm you,” he said, “but I see two yolk sacs here.”  I started laughing, making the ultrasound jump all over the screen.

TRIPLETS?!?!?!

Only maybe – in the double-yolk sac, the doctor only found one heartbeat.  It’s possible that’s it’s too early, and it’s also possible that one of them didn’t make it.  I asked if the vanishing triplet could have caused my wonky numbers, and he said yes.  That’s my theory of the moment.  Henry says that clearly the twin that might have eaten his twin is the evil twin.

Baby number two was measuring a few days behind – at 5w4d – which is pretty much fine at this point from what I read.  We didn’t measure the second heartbeat but it looked similar to the first to me.

So, in conclusion, everything is wonderful and I have at least two adorable little beating hearts inside of me!  The only bad thing is that we were in SUCH a state of joy and shock that we walked out and I forgot the ultrasound picture I’m pretty sure they printed for us.

But I get to go back and see them again next Thursday, so hopefully I’ll get a picture then!