You'd think already having a daughter born premature would have prepared me for having a second neonatal journey. But giving birth to twins at 34 weeks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was unlike anything I had experienced before.
To start with, for the last 10 weeks of my pregnancy, I was going in for weekly scans but for the final four, my husband, Shayne, couldn't come with me because no visitors were allowed into the hospital. So, each time I was terrified of hearing bad news on my own. Fortunately, he could be there for Miles and Elijah's birth, but he was only allowed to stay for an hour afterwards.
I pushed to be discharged as soon as I could, 27 hours after the twins were born, so that we could be together to deal with what was happening. I made myself get onto my feet and move around, despite the pain, because I knew from having Isabelle that that was the best way to heal. But being discharged meant leaving the boys. When I had my daughter at 34 weeks, we had been able to room in at the hospital, visit whenever we wanted, and when she was well enough, Isabelle was able to move into our room. But it was a totally different story with the twins.
We live at least 45 minutes from the hospital and since I was still recovering from my c-section, we had to drive in together. But, because of the changes to parental access caused by COVID-19, we couldn’t go onto the unit together. So one of us would have to stay in the waiting room while the other went in to be with Miles and Elijah, and then we would switch over. Once there, we had to divide our time between the twins, so we both got only 40 minutes a day with each twin.
Because we couldn’t be in there together, and Elijah was receiving oxygen via a tube attached to the wall, we needed a nurse to help us take both twins out at the same time and then put them back into their incubators. So we probably managed to hold them both together just twice each throughout the whole month.
The guilt we felt about not being able to give Miles and Elijah the care we felt they needed was immense. I was constantly watching the clock, working out how much time to spend with each baby, when it was Shayne's turn to come in and when we needed to go back to home-school Isabelle and spend time with her. When she had been in intensive care, she had got 100% of our time, and that would have been the same even if she had been born during COVID-19 because she was a singleton. But because we couldn't be on the unit together, we had to divide a smaller amount of time two ways.
We fought as hard as we could for that to be changed as we thought 'one parent per patient’ would mean parents of twins could both be on the unit, especially as the NICU wasn't busy and we were the only ones with multiples. But even though there were other units nearby where that was the policy, we still weren't allowed. We felt like it didn't make sense.