Owen Schneider’s story

Source: Wired 

Jessica Green was getting impatient. She was 19 weeks pregnant and waiting for her ultrasound images at Whitehorse General Hospital, but it was taking forever. She’d never had to wait this long before. Her fiancé, Kris Schneider, had already headed back to work for the day, and Green wanted to do the same. She told the receptionist that she would pick up the images later and headed out. It was late October in Whitehorse, the capital city of Canada’s northern Yukon Territory, and winter was beginning to set in.

The ultrasound technician caught up to her in the parking lot. Green couldn’t leave, the tech said. She needed to be admitted, right away. Green remembers responding with some sort of instinctive, mulish refusal: “I can’t.”

But she knew her pregnancy was considered high-risk: She was 37, she’d conceived via IVF, and she was carrying twins. She followed the tech inside and headed up to the maternity ward, where she learned that her cervix was shortening precipitously, a precursor to labor—it was already down to 1.1 centimeters, less than half of what it should have been. A baby’s lungs and guts take a long time to fully develop in the womb, and her tiny babies still lacked the abilities to breathe or digest food on their own. But the barrier between them and the outside world was fading away.

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