perry-nay-tall-oh-gist - 10 1/2 weeks - 5/13/2013

For Nick's pregnancy, we used an obstetrician/gynecologist down in Santa Barbara. Since the possibility was close to 100% that our kids would be in the NICU for an extended amount of time, we decided to switch OB's to one at our local hospital which just opened up a state of the art NICU. Her name is Dr. Yin and she is this adorable woman who just loves Katy and these babies and it was obvious from the first visit. However, when you find out you are having triplets, you can't just go see an OB, you have to see a perinatologist. Basically, a high risk pregnancy doc. Ours is named Dr. Shields. There are good and bad things about seeing one of these doctors. The good is that every time you see him, you get a very high tech ultrasound with an in depth analysis of each of the babies. The bad is that every time you see him, you get a very high tech ultrasound with an in depth analysis of each of the babies. This brings with it bad news. On our first visit with him, he was very excited for us, but stressed the medical practice of selective reduction, which is exactly what it sounds like. His straight to the point attitude and lack of a compassionate bedside manner was very off putting. We understand that there are a lot of people who are pro-parental-choice, but we are not one of those. Apparently we did not make this very clear when he asked us for an explanation of why we did embryo adoption. He asked us on not one, not two, but on three separate occasions if this was something we wanted to do. Out of morbid curiosity I asked him what he meant by "selective reduction." He went on to explain how they would snip the back of the baby(ies) neck near the spinal cord and the baby(ies) would be absorbed by Katy and the remaining baby(ies). Immediate images that we had conjured up in our heads from the multiple articles which had recently come out about Dr. Kermit Gosnell flooded both of our minds. Probably more aggressively than I should have, I explained our spiritual reasoning for not wanting "selective reduction" and that our position would not change, to which he rescinded...a bit. Dr. Shields then explained to us how all embryos are surrounded by amniotic sacs containing amniotic fluid. However, each amniotic sac is composed of two membranes. The outer membrane, or chorion, is part of the placenta and contains the inner membrane. The inner membrane, or amnion, contains the amniotic fluid and the fetus. Baby A, the single embryo, had its own chorion, amnion, amniotic fluid, and placenta. Baby B and C, the split embryo and our identicals, each had their own amnions and amniotic fluid, but were contained within the same chorion and shared a placenta. This all became important later, but for now, we knew Baby A was the biggest, Baby B second, and Baby C came in third. Heartbeats normal for all three, and we were the proud parents of triplet babies!