Sarah Dixon and her partner Terry will take little Arthur and Charlie on a day-hike to mark the day
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Sarah Dixon will celebrate her first Mother’s Day as a mom by hiking with her newborn twin boys and partner Terry on Vancouver Island.
“I don’t expect the babies to do anything like make me breakfast,” Dixon said with a laugh over the phone from Courtenay.
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Her boys were born on Jan. 23, at 33 weeks — Charlie weighed three pounds, 15 ounces, and Arthur three pounds, 10 ounces.
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“We were super surprised when we found out it was twins,” Dixon said. As if on cue, one, or perhaps both, could be heard gurgling in the background.
Twins are rare, and in Dixon’s case meant a bit of added concern because of inherited heart arrhythmia, irregular heart beats that can be more dangerous when they are genetic.
“I consulted my cardiologist when we were thinking of trying and they reassured me that I should be fine, I just needed to be monitored for the delivery,” Dixon said.
When her pregnancy was confirmed, her doctors on the Island took no chances and referred Dixon to the specialized cardiac obstetrics clinic at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver for monitoring.
She was asked to come to Vancouver early and, thanks to an organization in the Comox Valley called YANA (You Are Not Alone) that provides temporary housing in Nanaimo, Victoria and Vancouver, they had a place to stay.
“They offer accommodations to families who need to travel for family care,” Dixon said. “They provided us with an apartment the whole time we were in Vancouver. It was a huge relief.”
The couple travelled to Vancouver in late January to give themselves some time, but the boys had other ideas.
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Unlike paternal twins, fraternal twins each have their own placentas, and shortly after the couple arrived in Vancouver it was discovered during a routine ultrasound that one of the boys wasn’t getting all the nourishment he needed, so an emergency C-section was performed three days after Dixon arrived.
“In Sarah’s particular case, she has a cardiac condition that can be high risk,” said Dr. Jasime Grewal, a professor of medicine at UBC and director of the cardiac obstetrics clinic at St. Paul’s Hospital.
The genetic condition involves the electrical system of the heart, she said.
“So what essentially can happen in that scenario is during times of stress, that flight-or-fight response, it can become life-threatening arrhythmia essentially, so the concern was that delivery occur in a place where that cardiac condition could be managed and not become an issue during her labour.
“Of course, things are more complicated because she was pregnant with twins.”
Cardiac obstetrics at St. Paul’s is a provincial program that looks after women with heart disease from across B.C., caring for them through their pregnancies, “optimizing things so you don’t run into life-threatening scenarios,” Grewal said. “To be proactive rather than reactive.
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“It’s not to say that we don’t have things happen, but the idea is that if you’ve done what you need to do over the course of the pregnancy, the likelihood of having a catastrophic event is mitigated.”
The boys stayed in neonatal intensive care for four weeks, time well spent by Dixon and Terry.
Any parent who has brought home a two- or three-day-old baby from the hospital and wondered how society could be so irresponsible as to leave such a vulnerable little thing in the care of two amateurs can appreciate that Dixon is grateful for that month of specialized care.
“The nurses are amazing, they taught us everything,” Dixon said. “By the time we could bring them home it was still really scary because they were so little, but we’d had a lot of supervised training.
“You’d obviously not choose that kind of experience, but it was a silver lining. I was like, ‘I can’t believe other people go home after a day and not get this four-week training.”
Dixon’s Aussie shepherd Frank has taken to the boys and, who knows, might be of help in keeping them from wandering too far once they are crawling.
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The boys weigh about nine pounds now and are named after the couples’ late maternal grandfathers: Charlie was Sarah’s granddad, Arthur was Terry’s.
The names they had picked out, but they were unsure which would get which name, until they were born.
“It was very obvious to us which one was Arthur and which one was Charlie, for some reason” Dixon said.
“They look quite different from one another, different facial features. And Arthur has a lot more hair.”
The parents don’t plan to have more children now that they have two adorable baby boys.
“I know moms are supposed to say this, but they’re such cute, sweet little guys.”
gordmcintyre@postmedia.com
x.com/gordmcintyre
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