Hallo. I gave birth to my twin baby girls prematurely at 23rd of November at 24+4 wks via emergency c-section due to early contractions that couldn't be stopped. My first born beautiful girl, Emmanouela, stayed with us for 25 days. She got her angel wings on the 17th of December due to a grade 4 brain haematoma that occured when she was 3 days old. After the loss of Emmanouela everyone in the NICU kept telling us that our other baby will survive and "that is what uually happens etc etc".

On the day (and exact time) Emmanouela got her wings, our second baby girl, Michaela, was having heart surgery to close her PDA. Everyone was really optimistic that Michaela would survive everything. However, the surgery as it was revealed the next days was really hard for her. Gradually her kidneys started to fail and we lost our precious Michaela too on the 31st of December after she fought really hard due to acute kidney failure.

In 2 weeks we lost both of our babies, two beautiful healthy babies born just so very soon. And now I am standing here trying to figure out how to live with that. Our babies were conceived after 4 IVF tries and we were so happy. During my pregnancy I suffered from anxiety in case something happened to my girls. I didn't want to tell people in case they would "jinx" it. Does this even make sense? But after our 20wk growth scan that everything were normal I started to feel slightly more confident and told people even though deep down I was scared to bits.

Now, after all this I have to deal with the guilt that if I hadn't told anyone maybe my girls would still be in my belly and not born prematurely. I have to live with the feeling that my babies were forcefully taken from my belly. I have to live with the actual physical loss of my babies from my body. I have to live with the fact that I had to donate all the breast milk I pumped while my babies were still alive instead of feeding it to my babies. But most importantly I have to live without my babies.

My arms are empty, my heart is aching and I want noone to comfort me. I am keeping all my friends away, I havent talked to a single one of them after I informed them of our losses. Noone came to the funerals of our girls not even my parents as I didnt want them there.
And I ask how do I keep moving forward from now on? Will we ever have a baby to hold? I will be 41 years old in March and after 4 IVFs, where do we go from here? I want my girls back...
Please help....

Dear Mary
What beautiful names you chose for your daughters, you will now be their loving mum for the rest of your life. I am trying to find the right words, if they feel wrong to you please forgive me or curse me, whatever comes up first in you. I believe all of us hate to be in this place, but for some of us time made us accustomed to it. During my own journey I had to realise some insights, and it took time for me to learn. I am not sure if you feel the same now or at any other time point. First you are a mum now. No matter how long your girls were with you, you will always be remembering and missing them. A lot of the pain and misery in you is because you’re their mum, and you’re not allowed to take care of your girls in this life. Most of us feel guilty for not being able to do so, however you need to be told again and again that this was not your fault, and even if you had told anyone of your dreams, that most probably would not have changed anything. We all live with our pieces of guilt, though it seems impossible at the beginning. Putting too much weight on our guilt does not help anyone so put it aside for now. Now your first and only goal is surviving. This is meant literally. You have to keep breathing, you have to move around, you have to stay alive by eating and drinking. Doing all of this while an unbearable pain is filling you from the inside and bursting your heart into a thousand bloody pieces is very hard work. You have never been challenged with such hard trials. Try to survive. Everything else will just happen somehow. You might need somebody to help you through this. If there is no understanding human being in you close family or friends, seek for strangers or professionals. I could not have done it without a few people who did understand. The timing you choose is totally up to you. Everything you feel or do now is somehow normal and right for you. I always felt weird and alien, I often still don’t recognise myself. It often helped me to do something active for my daughter. Even though it hurts, I put a lot of work in decorating her grave, writing letters to her, sorting her pictures and so on. Many of your thoughts might circle around the medical facts. Or you might be dwelling over the ‘what ifs’. Or you are panicking about the future. You will have to endure all of it. There is no easy solution or light way. And you will go through this, you will survive somehow. I can’t say how I did it, I just tried to keep going. Try anything to give you a little strength. Be nice to yourself, you deserve it. More than that, you deserve it more than anyone else in the world. Because you are in hell right now, it is the most horrible place you can imagine in this world. And you have not done anything to deserve that. None of us has. Just survive. For us, for yourself. Most of all for your girls. Because you are the only one to always remember and love them in this life no matter what. Because you’re a mum now.

I couldnt just read and go. My name is Machaela (spelt differently to your beautiful angel, but still the same name).
Sending love, love and more love to you and your twin baby angels.
Please take care of yourself, eat your favourite food, drink hot tea, sleep when you can and let people take care of you.

Mary, I am so sorry for the loss of your twin girls. Im 2yrs out and all I can tell you is yes it is one of the most difficult things you will ever have to go through but you WILL get through this somehow. Take each moment/day at a time. There will be times where you wont want to see anybody and others when you will want to just talk to someone all day. You did everything you possibly could for your girls and you will always be their mother. Plesse be kind to yourself and give yourself time xx

Please don't beat yourself for wanting to share the news of your babies while you were pregnant, that did not cause them to be born prematurely. YOU DID NOTHING WRONG... Thank you for sharing your girls with us...you've been through something very dramatic and you NEED PEOPLE to help you out of the fog. I know you want to isolate yourself and there will be days that you do, however you are going to have to let people in in order to function again.
The pain is incredibly unbearable and every day my only goal is to put on foot in front of the other...it's all I can do.

Thank you all for your words of support. It means a lot to me to have people that actually understand what I am going through (even though I wish noone in here was).

I am a mum now...

I need to remember that everyday because i have to be honest and say that I often doudt the fact that I am because I could not keep my babies in this world.

Thank you again and am so so sorry that you all had to suffer such a cruel and unfair loss.

I am a mum now xxx