Juggling on a cliff edge

Tomorrow, I will/should be delivering my babies at 28 weeks.

I am terrified. We have to believe that this is the right decision for our babies. 

As a friend of mine said:

‘If you had one baby in each hand and both were dangling over the cliff edge, you wouldn’t let go of one to save the other. You would hold onto both for as long as you possibly could’.

I know that if we gave up on our tiny girl, we would feel guilty for the rest of our lives about not giving her an albeit slim chance of life. We would always look at our little boy knowing that we sacrificed our other baby for him. This would not be fair on him or on her.

Equally though, I love our little boy, and feel such guilt about what we are about to put him through,taking him out of a cosy womb where he is doing just fine, the 20% risk that we could lose him, not to mention the fears about his health outcomes, to give his sister a 50:50 chance of life.

I guess that if we lose her in the hours after she is born, we can truly focus on him. If we lose them both, it will be the hardest of blows and we will probably question our choice forever.

I am petrified about tomorrow. At the c-section I won’t get to see my babies, they will be whisked away, and will have  multitude of procedures happening to them, drips and intravenous lines inserted etc. It will be hours before I get to see them, by which time one or both could have passed. This is not the way that I had envisaged it. No cuddle of a normal size baby immediately after birth, no gazing into my new babies eyes, no cuddles or gazes for weeks probably.

So, as long as the little girl is still alive tomorrow, this is my last 24 hours of having a lovely baby bump, the last 24 hours of feeling little kicks, the last 24 hours of knowing (that at the moment) my babies are safe and warm inside.

Tomorrow we will hand them over to doctors and incubators, and will be merely spectators in their new struggle for survival.

Wish us luck.