Twins?

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11/13/2018 13:13

Subject: Re:Twins?

quote

Anonymous

OP, I understand what you are feeling. We were in our mid-40s when we were having children. My wife had medical issues that required signficant care during her 30's and early 40's and we could not attempt to have children until we were in our mid-40's. Due to her medical conditions we had to go with a surrogate for both her health and safety and the children.

We started at SG, but had 3 failed transfers. We switched to VCRM in Reston and Dr. Sharara was very helpful. Both facilities tried to discourage us from transferring two, but we did. We wanted to have two and were willing to handle twins. I think the only reason that we were not discouraged much more actively than we were, is because we had a surrogate around 30 years old. Had my wife been carrying, they would have been much more adamant. There are a LOT more dangers to both mother and child for an AMA mother and an AMA mother pregnant with twins increases the risks exponentially. While there are many healthy babies born to women in their 40's, the dangers are significantly higher; same for multiples. Our children were born at 34 weeks and spent 16 days in the NICU including Respiratory Distress Syndrome for one. The IVF cycles including a fresh cycle plus two frozen transfers from SGIF then switching to VCRM for another fresh cycle was expensive. Then the hospital expenses rolled in. All told, it cost around $170K for those 16 days in the NICU. Our insurance fought us about many of the charges. It wasn't until my twins' first birthday that I finally finished battling with the insurance company about the costs. We ended up with about $13-14K out of pocket only because the hospital ended up forgiving about another $15K in expenses that the insurance refused to cover.

Then there is the are. The NICU helped us get the twins on a 3 hour cycle. We woke both twins up at the same time for diaper, feeding, playing and then back to sleep. It was exhausting. The onoly way we ended up making it work is that we both took off a lot of work. My wife had 6 weeks of leave. I had 2. We then both too unpaid FMLA leave part-time for 12 weeks. I worked M/W/F and my wife worked T/Th for those 12 weeks. And we started sleeping in shifts. My wife slept 8pm-3am. I slept from 2am-7am. We didn't spend much time together outside of work for those 4 months. And even still, it was exhausting. The twins did not both sleep more than 3 hours until they were 8.5 months old. These were little peeing machines. At the height (around 10 months old), we were going through 28-30 diapers a day. A case of 224-252 diapers typically lasted a week.

While it is now less work (they are 7 now), for the first 18 months, it was more than double the work. And those first 18 months are still somewhat of a blur. The only thing that helped is that I am a very healthy active person, even though I am 15-20 years older than my peers (parents of my children's friends) that requires relatively little sleep. I am normally more active than most 30 somethings. But I have to say that having twins has taxed even my stamina. If you are in your 40's now, unless you are very healthy and can operate for extended periods of time on little sleep and are high functioning and organized, you want to be careful with twins. That first year or two is going to be very, very hard on you physically (and my wife didn't even go through pregnancy and she was still exhausted from the twins) and also emotionally on your marriage. If your marriage is not solid, twins will strain it to its limits.

Through our multiples club, I have met many other twin families including ones that have older singleton children and they have all said that having twins was much harder than having two at separate times. Most all of the women we know who had twins after singletons ended up leaving the workforce to be SAHM. Even with a nanny, it's still very hard.

Good luck, but I would caution as most of the other PPs have against implanting two unless you are very, very sure about all aspects of this decision.