beach baby.” I pulled down the bright pink polka dot rash guard that had started to rise up and expose my stomach.
“Ha, right!” he said shaking his head the way he usually did at my far-fetched ideas.
I turned back to sneer at him and stuck my tongue out playfully. He pulled his Ray Ban sunglasses back down over his eyes, and I could see bits of sunscreen on his freckled cheek that he hadn’t rubbed in all the way.
“Hey, come here, you.” I pulled him close to me and we plopped down on the beach, scattering sand all over us. I reached for his face and gently rubbed in the sunscreen. The mid-day sun was beating down with force. I reached into my beach bag, grabbed my tube of sunscreen and reapplied some more to his pale back.
“You know, you are going to be an amazing mother,” he said, leaning in to kiss me. His radiant smile was a mile wide. “I can’t wait. I’m going to be a daddy!” he said, reaching back over to me.
“I know, me too—I’m so excited—just eight months to go, little one!” I said rubbing my still completely flat tummy.
I’d spent the last six months or so leading up to this trip in full anticipation. I’d imagined the lush vegetation, expansive beaches and rolling white-capped waves. I was ready for sun, sand, surf and deep relaxation—time to tan on the beach and dream about our life together—and our new baby! What would he or she look like? Would she look like her daddy? Would he be a spitting image of me? Would she be sweet and smart like her father or extroverted and feisty like me?
We had the whole week mapped out—hiking in Hana to hidden waterfalls, surfing lessons on Kaannapali beach, snorkeling over coral reefs and sunset dinner cruises—toasting our happiness with grape juice. We took long walks on the beach, hand in hand, planning out the rest of our lives. This pregnancy had been a bit of an unexpected surprise, but we had wholeheartedly welcomed it. We both immediately fell in love with the thought of being parents. Even though we were young, we weren’t overwhelmed or anxious by the change. This was our time—we had thought—to grow our family and grow in our love for one another.
We walked over to the little rental hut near our hotel—the one with all the brochures of life-changing adventures that the islands had to offer.
“Aloha, how can I help you?” asked the beautifully tanned and toned mid-twenties surfer working behind the bar.
“Aloha,” Ed said proudly, as if he’d been to Hawaii a million times. That was almost true: Ed‘s family had visited every year, sometimes twice, since he was three. “We would like to rent some snorkel gear for the day.”
“Of course, here are two masks and two pairs of fins,” he said, handing Ed the gear. “They’re yours for the day.”
“Oh great!” I replied, thinking there was plenty of time for swimming, maybe even taking a nap on the beach and perhaps going back around sunset.
“Be sure to check out the reefs near Black Rock,” said the surfer.
“Mahalo,” I said as I grabbed my gear. I turned and look back at Ed; we were still standing in front of the equipment hut. “I can’t believe I’ve never done this before. I can’t wait to see schools of fish swimming around us.”
“The reefs around Black Rock are incredible,” Ed replied.
“How far of a swim is it?” I started to ask, but then a sudden, sharp pain in my abdomen stopped my words.
“Ouch!” I screamed.
Ed instinctively dropped the snorkel gear on the beach and put his arm behind my back. “Babe, what‘s wrong?”
“Ow!” I yelled again.
“Crystal, what‘s wrong!?” Ed said again.
“Really painful stomach cramps.” I hunched over trying to breathe. “Just give me a sec,” I said, trying to inhale and exhale deeply.
“Here, let’s get you up to the room fast,” Ed said as he scooped me up into his arms.
The scene back at our hotel room was a chaotic mess. I was hunched over on the couch screaming in pain. Ed sat beside me, frantically googling things on his laptop. He was repeating the words, “It‘s okay, don’t worry, everything is going to be fine.”
“I hope so,” I choked out the words.
Heavy cramps were pounding inside me like an earthquake, burning like an inferno. I curled up in a ball on the foldout couch to ease the pain. I began to feel incredibly sick to my stomach. Could this be morning sickness? I thought to myself.
Then I felt it.
Blood started to trickle down slowly between my legs. I thought that was normal. Everyone said I might have some implantation bleeding. But it kept flowing and flowing. After several minutes, I knew something was definitely not right. I had already soaked through my board shorts and onto the palm tree printed pillow I’d been sitting in front of. I jumped up and dashed to the bathroom. I locked the door, still trying to convince myself everything was fine, and sat down, my toes curled up against the cold hard tile floor. With one hand on my stomach and the other gripping onto the wall, I let go and it all came flushing out. And then I looked down into the toilet bowl. I will never be able to get the horrifying image I saw there out of my head. I screamed in panic. I kept screaming until my throat was raw. Ed, who had been pounding on the door, demanding I let him in, finally kicked it open. He looked down and saw what I saw and gasped.
He reached for me and I collapsed into his arms.
When I opened my eyes, it was still dark outside; mist covered our bedroom windows. I sat up in the bed breathing deeply as I thought about the haunting memory of the painful nightmare I had already lived once. Each time the dream was a bit different; sometimes we would be snorkeling when it happened, other times we would be in the middle of a candlelight dinner on the beach. Each story ended in the same way. I lost our first baby in Hawaii that first summer after we were married, and then two years later, lost our second baby on a trip to Las Vegas. The memory of losing our two babies still haunted me and the fear was now projecting itself onto our twin pregnancy.
How I wished the Twin to Twin diagnosis had been just a nightmare. Nightmares ended when you woke up, and everything returned to normal. I turned to look at Ed, who had fallen asleep with a laptop on our comforter. He’d been awake most of the night researching TTTS, carrying the panic and fear for both of us.
I nudged his arm gently.
“Did that really happen?” I softly whisper. “Wait. Before you answer, just tell me it didn’t. Tell me I dreamt it.”
He sighed. He couldn’t tell me what I so badly wanted to hear.
“Are we actually going to talk to a specialist today about some bizarre blood transfusion disease?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so,” he replied groggily.
“I’m scared,” I confessed.
“Me too,” he said as he hugged me tightly. He held me in bed for a long time. As we got dressed, he went over some of his findings of TTTS with me, the parts he left out were too terrifying for me to even imagine. I had decided that, in a desperate attempt to avoid complete distress, I was going to stay off the internet. I did not want to terrorize myself with unknowns or potential scenarios of TTTS. In order to survive this, to beat this, the babies—our girls—needed to be calm and soothed, which meant I needed to be that way as well. If I was a nervous wreck, they would feel that and feed off of it. It was far easier to hear what I needed to know about this disease from Ed. It was hard to keep all the details straight, but I wanted to walk into the Maternal-Fetal Medicine (MFM) office and feel a little familiar with some of the terms they would use.
Ed explained to me what Dr. Bill had tried to the day before—that because our girls were identical and shared a placenta, they had many abnormal