“I Was on the Pill and Got Pregnant with Triplets” | Lizzy’s Unexpected Motherhood Journey

I mean, it's quite rare to have triplets.

Although I've spoken to a few triplet mums, it's starting to become a bit common for me because I know lots of multiple mums, but it is still rare.

Yeah, one part of your story, Lizzie, is that struck me was your conversations you had about fetal medicine tell us about yeah my experience

so um so first of all when I had my daughter I was my first daughter I was really really sick so when I found out it was triplets and I was like aha I realize now why I'm so sick because I was sick anyway with one and with three I was like unbelievably sick and And they kept on when I was going through the scans, they kept on saying, right, you've got you've got three now, but you might not have three next time.

So you've got to be aware of like vanishing twin syndrome.

And we'll just check that there's still three babies.

So I'd gone for like the private scans and I'd had the private scan and I'd started on the journey with Fetal Medicine for the initial scan to check there was three and then I was being transferred under the consultant care at Manchester St Mary's, which is where the multiple specialists are in the North West.

So I'd gone to them and they'd done like a scan and because I knew that there was a really high risk of obviously not continuing with three, You know, when we found that there was three healthy babies, three healthy sort of sacks, everybody was in their own sack, everybody's heartbeat was beating strong and we got to hear all three heartbeats.

It was a really, really like relief moment where I was so happy that there were still three babies.

But then afterwards, they took us into a separate room, me and my mum, because my mum came with me.

And the doctor sort of said in a really like sort of, you know, just matter of fact way that, you know, if we want to selectively reduce, then we can do.

And of course, you've just seen three healthy babies and you've just been worried for weeks and weeks and weeks about whether you were still going to have three healthy babies.

And it's like they show you this wonderful moment and then straight away it was like, do you want to reduce? And of course in that moment, you're like, how, of course I don't want to reduce.

You've just told me that everybody's healthy.

Like that, that's not something.

And I sort of shut the conversation down very, very quickly.

And, As did my mum.

No, I'm glad you did, because I heard this quite a lot with triplet mums, lots of the professionals.

I don't know for what reason.

I don't know.

They do talk about selective reduction.

I mean, how did that conversation make you feel after knowing and seeing the baby's heartbeat? Oh, my gosh, I'm going to be a mother as

well as a singleton.

I really, really wanted there to be a bigger conversation than just a... just like dropping it in like that.

I felt like, I felt like actually, although, cause my own, like my own personal beliefs is obviously, you know, I do believe like it's a woman's right to choose.