“Oh ish. Three.”
Those were the first words out of CH’s mouth the second
the ultrasound tech closed the exam room door as she walked out.
I nodded as I shakily tried to put my pants back on.
We had just finished our first ultrasound, in which we
were surprised to see three little amniotic sacs on the screen. Three sacs.
Three tiny blobs. Three flickering hearts. Triplets.
I really don’t know why we were so surprised. We hail
from IVF Nation, where the percentage of multiples pregnancies is high. But
triplets hadn’t come up in any of
the handful of conversations we’d had with our RE following our ERs or leading
up to our ET. Our embryos were on the low end of the grading scale, and he
hadn’t been convinced we’d conceive at all, so he’d given us statistics for
just singletons and twins. In fact, in the transfer review he’d provided
moments after inserting three tiny humans into my uterus, he’d said that we had
an 18% chance of twins—and stopped there. No mention of triplets. None. Zero.
Zip. So we’d gone home knowing we had a small possibility of twins but praying
(begging) for even one to stick.
Triplets didn’t even enter our minds. I mean, we
acknowledged that they could
happen—after all, we’d transferred three embryos. But the acknowledgement was
fleeting quickly dismissed. We still didn’t consider it 12 days later when my
nurse called with our BFP and my ridiculously high hCG level. Not even when each
beta yielded astronomically higher levels. Not even when my nurse said, “You
probably have more than one in there.” We always thought it was twins.
And then we found ourselves staring at three sacs on a
grainy black-and-white screen.
“I’m sorry, did you say three?” I responded when the tech
nonchalantly said she saw three heartbeats. “Count again.”
Oh ish. Three.
