“Pushed Like There Was No Tomorrow”

Written by: Toby Amir Fox

It was August 14, 2008. The only thing worse than being pregnant in Arizona in the summer is being pregnant with twins during the Arizona summer. So by the time I reached 36 weeks in mid-August I was miserable. Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled to have made that far without any complications, but I was huge, hot and exhausted.  At 36 weeks 5 days the decision was made to induce my labor. The babies and I were both healthy, but for two weeks my blood pressure had been on the high end of normal. I was also very swollen and my doctor felt that the risk me of staying pregnant developing complications outweighed the benefits to the babies. So off to the hospital we went.

The induction started at 10:30 am and I labored without any major complications for the rest of the day and into the night. Around 11:15 pm two things started to happen: my epidural began to wear off and I started to feel my contractions more intensely. I paged the nurse, who determined it was time to push. Now this is when things started getting really interesting. I was determined to deliver vaginally and agreed to deliver in the operating room in case there were complications. The next 15 minutes were a blur as the staff prepared to transfer me. I remember very little of what happened during this time, with one exception. I clearly remember my doctor coming over to my beside for a quick chat with my husband and me. At which point he calmly explained that it was getting close to midnight and there was a real possibility that our twins would be born on two different days, with two different birthdays. Were we ok with this and did we have a preference one way or the other?

Labor Day: Surrogate Birth Story

Written by: Marisa Jaffe

My husband and I went through an extremely traumatic and horrible undiagnosed five year infertility struggle. I was finally diagnosed with Celiac disease (we figured it out from a Dr. Oz show!) and decided to use a gestational carrier because I was too traumatized to be pregnant again after all the miscarriages (including one at 20 weeks on our 8th IVF cycle) and 11 failed IVF cycles,

Surrogacy is illegal in New York so we had to look elsewhere for a carrier. An agency matched us with most wonderful woman down in Dallas, TX. Once she became pregnant with the twins I decided to fly down and stay with her the last six weeks of the pregnancy to help out as much as I could. It was December 2010 and the weatherman was calling for a pretty bad snowstorm in New York, so at the last minute I switched my flight to one a few hours earlier to try and beat the storm. I made it to Texas safely before the storm.

Then the unexpected happened. Just 12 hours after I landed, our surrogate went into labor! She woke me up with a light shake on my shoulder and whispered “Marisa, Marisa, I think we need to go to the hospital.” I was completely taken aback. My husband was back in New York, it was 3AM, she wasn’t due for another six weeks, I had just arrived in Texas…what was happening!?