Something seemed wrong on tuesday. I called the hospital, they instructed me to come straight into the delivery room. When I arrived there were 6-8 of people waiting for me, assuming that they had to deliver the twins.

Up until that point I had not been too worried, but after my female doctor had told me that both heart beats were positive, she looked at her male colleague and said: “it looks very much like a TTTS.”

I peaked at the sonography screen and fetus 1, the name which we have resumed to for the smaller baby, was pressed to the uterus wall with almost no more amniotic water and space to move. Fetus 2 already had more than 10cm of amniotic water and not only are these the criteria for a laser fetoscopy, it became clear that we had yet another life threatening situation – only this time for both babies. As I had written in one of my last blogs, one baby basically starves, the other one drowns if this complication remains untreated.

It all happened very fast, I was given a very painful shot into my leg muscles to speed up lung development, plus an infusion to stop my contractions and after another Doppler sonography I had one minute to give Pouya a kiss before walking into the OR.

I had to be awake for the duration of the surgery. Luckily enough I was accompanied behind the curtain by a wonderful young female anesthesiologist who totally chimed into a drug-infused shittalking session with me. We agreed that it is basically Yoda with a laser sword fighting off the dark side that had gripped both babies. The surgery was very painful to me, and I can honestly say that my body has now started to take a toll. We are approaching 26 weeks, crazy to think that a normal pregnancy would last 14more…

After the surgery the doctors explained that Fet 1 really has only a third of the placenta and we would have to wait & see how she’ll react to her new circumstances.

It has now been 48hours and both are alive, recovering as good as we could possibly wish for.

Thank You everyone for your texts and love! I really appreciate every single message. It goes without saying that there are some very sad moments sometimes, but I am trying – as always – to resume to Rilke: Why would you want to exclude the negatives, maybe they are the ones that will heal you.

If you have some, I am taking all the book recommendations I can get, currently I am attacking one piece of literature that has been on my bucket list for a long time: War & Peace 😁

Ending with some new observations:

• these long, agonizing animalistic screams one hears out of the delivery rooms do not convince me that one can forget as soon as one sees the newborn…
• Having now been in two different hospitals rooming with different females and their own stories my overall feeling about pregnancy has not changed. On the contrary, I am happy to have met multiple women my age that consider this time as the ultimate sacrifice, that want to punch all writers in the face when they describe pregnancy as this “wonder that is happening inside of you” or remind you in a condescending way “not to loose perspective. It will be such a short time.” Just today I had a conversation with like minds, one of them had to endure a postnatal depression, the other one described pregnancy as totally giving up her body and life. There might be and are multiple females out there that have the time of their lives and obviously having more than one child speaks for them not hating their first pregnancy as much as I do, but I am just very happy to be surrounded by women that have an attitude towards motherhood & feminism which I can identify with.
• The entire team of doctors, midwives and nurses at TU Munich is absolutely great, friendly and encouraging. I feel in very capable and loving hands.