In the spring of 2020, while my twins were in the NICU we remodeled our bathrooms. The plan was to do it before they came, but they were plotting against us before they were even earthside. We remodeled three bathrooms, but I only get to enjoy two of them. The third bathroom we now use almost exclusively to scrub poop off the girls’ clothes after a blowout.
The first time each of my twins pooped in their diapers, I sobbed tears of joy.
They were born more than four months prematurely. During their first week of life, they both suffered spontaneous bowel perforations—on the same day. What are the chances, one might wonder. I don’t know know because a Google search does not yield results to question like this.
The surgery to assess—and hopefully repair—the damage left them both with ostomies.
If you’re unfamiliar with what what an ostomy is, consider yourself blessed. It’s a hole in your abdomen with a portion of your intestine poking out. Instead of poop going all the way through the small intestine and colon and coming out the anus, your poop comes out through the hole in your abdomen and into a bag that’s taped to your skin. It’s a practical way to keep people alive, and it’s an unsanitary disaster when said person is a baby who pulls off the poop bag with reckless abandon.
The plan was—once they were bigger, and their bowels more developed—to reconnect the portion of the bowel that was sticking out of their bellies to the portion that was tied off (in a bag) inside of them, and to pray for poop, because that was that’s the only way to verify that surgery worked.
The pre-surgery scans showed that Vivienne should—in theory—be good to go, but that Margot could only be partially reconnected at that time. She would come home from the NICU with her ostomy, and they would reconnect her once her colon grew—if her colon grew.
The girls went to surgery on separate days this time, and everything went as planned. For Vivienne, this surgery was the beginning of her journey home from the NICU. She pooped, I cried. And despite being born on the cusp of what is considered viable, she was home just two weeks after her due date.
Margot’s incision got infected so they literally cut the incision site back open—not in the OR, but right in her bed—and they left it that way. Apparently things open to air heal faster. Margot finally pooped out of the new hole in her abdomen a couple of weeks after surgery, but shortly after that first poop, the poop stopped coming and her belly swelled.
If your waist were to increase in size by two or three inches overnight, you would seriously wonder what the heck was going on. Now imagine, a four pound baby whose waist size increased three inches overnight.
They pumped her full of contrast fluid and started to take x-rays—like a time-lapse for your insides. I waited, occasionally remembering to breathe. After hours of X-rays, the medical team came with the news.
Sometimes as the intestines heal after surgery, they get twisted or develop dense scar tissue that prevents waste from getting through. She had an obstruction, which could only be addressed surgically.
We went back to surgery. We spent hours in a waiting room filled with anxious parents. Worst case scenarios played in my head. There does, after all, come a point where there’s just not enough viable intestine to survive. Incompatible with life, is what they call it when you have a condition that will soon kill you. It’s such a weird way to put it, isn’t it? We hit the three hour mark in the waiting room and I was going to places in darkest parts of my head when the surgeon came in. The look on his face was not that of a man who was about to deliver very tragic news, so I relaxed.
She came back to us missing a couple feet of bowel, but she was in one piece. She was still compatible with life, so we started to pray for poop. A week passed, and there was still no poop. Eight days, and still no poop. On the ninth day, I was standing in my parents’ living room when I received a text message from my husband with a picture of a diaper smeared with green mucus, and I fell to my knees. Margot was more than five months old, and it was the first time she had ever dirtied a diaper, and the diapers did not stop coming.
Her missing bowel left her processing her milk a little too quickly. My days in the NICU were spent cleaning up blowouts and changing the sheets.
Her medical team decided it would be best to put her on a slow, continuous drip of milk, rather than giving it to her in bolus feeds throughout the day. In a previous surgery they had given her gtube—a tube that goes directly into the stomach and can be attached to a feeding pump. They weren’t sure if she would need it, but since they were already in there, they went ahead and did it. And—to my dismay—we found ourselves using it 24/7.
The continuous feeds didn’t stop the diarrhea, but it did help her gain enough weight that two months after her surgery, she was discharged. We rolled feeding pump attached to an IV pole into the elevator, out the hospital doors, and eventually through our front door—where we were a family of four at home for the first time—seven and a half months after their birth.
Carrying a newborn around the house while dragging an IV pole and oxygen tubing behind you is hardly what you picture when you picture having kids, I know now that it’s a lot of people’s reality. And it was a much better reality than the alternative.
Margot didn’t keep her feeding tube for long. The doctors saw that she was eager to eat and they knew that diarrhea was a small price to pay in exchange for the development of her oral motor skills. They removed the g-tube and she stopped needing oxygen. One day—against all odds—I looked at my daughters and thought they are so normal.
And like normal babies, they still have blowouts—twice as many, because, you know, twins.
I learned to move them from sitting to laying quickly if I wanted to avoid spending my afternoon in the blowout bathroom. But sometimes it’s just unavoidable, and I end up scrubbing poop of baby clothes in my newly remodeled bathroom. On those days I always remember how hard we used to pray for poop.