My husband and I were already the parents of a 4-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son when we began our triplet adventure. My pregnancy was a complete surprise, and around week 6 I started to worry that something was not right: I was so horribly morning sick that I was unable to go to work and was losing weight, fast. We joked that it must be a girl, because morning sickness had been worse with my daughter’s pregnancy than with my son’s, but it never crossed my mind that it might be multiples. At my routine 9-week pre-natal check, the doctor sounded concerned about my weight loss and ketones in my urine, but as she began the ultrasound it all made sense, to her, at least. She simply said, “Do you see what I see?” To which we replied, “No, we don’t see ultrasounds every day, you’ll have to orient us.” Doctor: “Well, here’s one sack of fluid, with a beautiful little baby, and here’s another sack of fluid with another beautiful baby”. We were pretty surprised at this point, but it was just a few minutes later when the OB found the third baby! I just cried and cried, and my husband had to sit down for a while before either of us was stable enough to be able to drive home. Fortunately, I responded well to medication for the nausea and was able to begin gaining weight, in a big way. I gained back all I had lost plus a whopping 80 pounds, but I tried to eat healthy and drink plenty of fluids to make the pounds count and keep the babies growing well. Most of the pregnancy was quite uneventful, other than the lengthy ultrasounds every 3-4 weeks. Around week 30, I went to Labor and Delivery with what felt not exactly like contractions, but more like tightening of the uterus. They monitored me for a couple of hours, but decided to send me home, since my cervix was still long and tightly closed, but I was to be on bed-rest for the rest of the pregnancy. My husband joked that I wasn’t doing much of anything anyway, so bed-rest wasn’t really a change at that point! By week 34, I was starting to feel very uncomfortable, to the point that sleep was almost impossible and it began to hurt a lot whenever the babies moved. A couple of days later at 34 weeks, 3 days, I woke up to what I deduced was amniotic fluid leaking—just enough to leave my pajamas damp. I wasn’t sure it was anything, since I had no other signs of labor, but we trekked in to Labor and Delivery to find that my water had indeed broken and I was 5 cm dilated. The only problem was, it was a holiday weekend (the 4th of July) and the 50+ bed NICU was completely full. The NICU wanted my doctor to postpone my delivery until they could transfer some babies to Children’s Hospital, but he insisted that I couldn’t wait since I was already so far dilated. About an hour later, I delivered the babies by C/section, and we had 3 healthy screaming baby girls to add to our family. Aubrie Renee weighed in at 5 lb 0 oz, Emily Katherine at 4 lb 11 oz, and Teresa Nicole at 4 lb 7 oz. We were very blessed that they had no medical issues at all associated with prematurity and only needed 2 weeks in the NICU to become pros at drinking from a bottle.

BY: Rebecca Dupaix