Today was the hospital where the twins were born annual NICU picnic. It's a chance see your kids doctors and nurses and families you may have met in the NICU. The twins were in the NICU for 8 weeks, so I got to know some people pretty well. I took the kids last year and it was all still so fresh then, I was really excited and almost nostalgic to see some of the nurses and families I got to know. This year, those feeling were not there, but I still went, hoping to see one nurse and one family in particular. The nurse was there, but sadly not the family.
When you check into the reunion, you are given a name tag for your kid with the gestational age of when they were born and their birth weight. Then you walk around, looking for people you know and checking out all the other kids and their name tags. Most of the kids seemed to be two or younger which makes sense for the reasons I stated above. I can imagine the NICU reunion becomes less important as your kids age.
Of course, I homed in on all the twins. There are a lot in the NICU! Here was one set of twins, born at 27 weeks, toddling around. Here was another set born at 29 weeks crawling. And another set of 32-weekers playing on the playground.
I couldn't help it. Seeing all these twins in perfect developmental form brought back all these feelings of 'why me'. Of course I am so glad for these twins and their families that they are doing well. But seeing the twins born even earlier than my guys, oh I don't know if it's good for me to go to these reunions.
I just kept flashing back to the night the twins were born, and the doctors saying to us, "Oh, 30-weekers? Those are the big babies! They will do fine! No worries, they'll just be here fattening up for a bit!". And we believed them!
Help! Wheelchair modifications, anyone?
5 years ago
3 comments:
Kelly - I feel the exact way you do. I'm pretty involved with our local twin group and sometimes I find it really hard. It's like I'm OK with seeing typically-developing singletons...but when I see twins that way, it's really hard. Especially when they were born early.
And the dr's said the same about the boys - how big they were! So freaking what!?!? It didn't seem to make much difference.
Sorry you're struggling but I get it.
Oh gosh, I'm sure it must be difficult that things are not perfect, but I'm sure there are other twin parents who didn't come at all because they didn't want to see all the healthy kids. Drake really is doing fabulously--maybe not perfect, but really, really good.
I hear you too - I was a member of our local twin club for 2 years, and I just can't go to the events anymore. I hate having to "explain" everything and it just makes me sad. My boys were born full term at 37w5d and I was so "proud" (smug) that I had made it that long and that they weren't in the NICU at all - and you know what - it doesn't/didn't matter. Medical problems can strike ANYONE no matter what things might look like at birth.
It hurts a lot. I get it - even though we didn't have the NICU experience, I still see other twins born much much earlier than ours who had no developmental delay at all.
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