I always wanted to be a mom. With a big family. Wanted to start right away after getting married. And, of course, breastfeeding was a given. But God had other plans. After two years of trying, I finally saw two pink lines. And if the story had continued down a traditional path—baby showers, new maternity clothes, What to Expect When Your Expecting, birthing classes, and a little bundle arriving on time—well, then there would be no extraordinary breastfeeding story to share.
Instead, two pink lines were followed by months and months of extreme hyperemesis, so that by the time of my 20-week ultrasound, I looked a bit like a skeleton with a bloated belly poking out under my shirt. My husband was a seminary student at the time, and we were temporarily living 12 hours from our home in rural NW Iowa while he completed a 6-month internship. We debated whether or not the ultrasound was even necessary. But insurance covered it. And I was so excited to see the wonder inside me.
And then—surprise!
There wasn’t a baby on the screen.
There were two babies, each in his own sac and neatly stacked on top of each other in my womb. And that’s when everything changed.
A Long, Hard Pregnancy
One baby had made me nervous. But two seemed impossible. I experienced everything from hyperemesis to preterm labor and suspected incompetent cervix, to cholestasis, to 9 weeks of complete bed-rest. In a hospital. The nearest hospital that could accommodate our situation was an hour away. I won’t pretend those weren’t long, hard, worrisome days laying in bed and being poked and prodded and pumped full of medication.
But God was so faithful through it all.
Family, friends, and church members flooded us with cards, flowers, food, prayers, visits. We were able to testify to our faith to the nursing staff. Our marriage grew in depth and love. Truths from God’s Word we had learned as children became alive. And while I didn’t get to peruse the maternity shops in the mall or paint the nursery, I did have lots of time to prepare for my boys’ arrival. I prayed and read books and meditated on Scriptures. And I read everything I could find about breastfeeding multiples.
Just before 32 weeks gestation, my womb was cut open, and my boys were yanked into the world: Simeon, 3 lbs 7 oz, and JohnOwen 3 lbs 6 oz.
I waited just long enough after the c-section for my legs to regain feeling before I asked the nurse for a breast pump. At that first pumping, I handed her just milliliters of my liquid gold, and she trooped it down the hall to the NICU.
And thus began our breastfeeding journey.
Extraordinary Breastfeeding Complications
I pumped and pumped until the whirring of that breast pump engine became so familiar that I heard it in my sleep. My babies were too young to have developed the suck and swallow and breath reflex, so for the first couple weeks they were fed by an ugly tube stuck down the nose into the stomach. I spent nearly every waking minute in the NICU. Scrub in. Pump. Talk to doctors. Hold my babies. Change their diapers. Watch their monitors. Pump more.
I couldn’t wait until I could finally feed them from my own breasts. When they were just a couple weeks old, JohnOwen was in my arms and acting strange. I knew something was wrong. I insisted the nurse run a test. By midnight he was fully intubated and we learned that he had caught several infections. The doctors even suggested a condition that would give him less than a 50% chance of surviving.
At Thanksgiving I began to breastfeed Simeon. He was a champ. Weigh the baby, feed him for an hour, weigh again. Success!
And then the bradycardia spells began. When my milk would let down, the flow would be more than he could handle. He would sometimes gasp and choke. Other times he would just go limp and his heart rate would plummet. So we used a breast shield, and I learned to watch his signals and accommodate his needs.
After one month in the NICU, Simeon was ready to come “home” to the Ronald McDonald House were I slept.
But JohnOwen was a sick little boy. He wasn’t gaining weight. His stomach had stopped working altogether. The tube now stretched from his nose to his intestine, bypassing the stomach altogether. The gastroenterologist insisted that we switch him from breast milk to a hypo-allergenic formula. I was crestfallen.
After two months in the NICU, JohnOwen came home. We had a full afternoon of learning how to use the heart and breathing monitors that both boys were connected to at all times. And there was the tube still in JohnOwen’s nose. We learned to use the machine attached to the tube to feed him the formula. Simeon was now successfully breastfeeding, and I had even weaned him off the breast shield, but JohnOwen was a long way off.
But I wasn’t giving up.
I knew my babies needed to breastfeed, and I was determined to do everything in my power to make that happen.
To be continued…
What a nice story you have here. This only shows that a mother will do anything for their children. Happy parenting!