First day inpatient

Monday, April 13th
I'm officially in the hospital on bedrest as of today around 2 p.m. I went into my OB's office at 1 p.m. for a normal appt. and they discovered that one of the babies has an irregular heartbeat so they sent me to the hospital right away for testing and said I would not be going home afterwards (until the babies are born). No time to pack a bag or anything. John left work immediately when I called to update him and met me at the hospital. They did tests, monitored the twins, did some more tests, gave me a steroid shot to help the twins' lungs develop, and hooked me up to an IV to administer fluids because they discovered I was contracting on top of it all. I wasn't feeling these contractions but they were about 3 minutes apart. This slowed down once the fluids were given. We don't know much right now other than "Baby A" is the one with the irregularity and they don't know why one would have it and the other one does not (seeing as though they are identical you'd think they'd both have it or both not have it). They do not seem too worried about the contractions because my cervix is still closed. They don't know if Baby A's heart arrhythmia is something that will correct itself (a lot of babies have this in utero but when they are born it goes away) or if a heart defect exists that was missed on earlier ultrasounds. My Perinatologist (high-risk pregnancy doctor) told us that he gets about one case of monoamniotic twins a year between the two hospitals he works at and in 17 years of practice has never seen this condition before (where one of them has an arrhythmia). So he doesn't even know how to proceed. We knew that monoamniotic twins (also called momo's) were rare months ago when they told us there was no membrane dividing them in their shared amniotic sac but this new development throws a whole new wrench into our situation. With normal momo's they put the mother in the hospital on bedrest as soon as she reaches 25-26 weeks (the point of viability, where the babies could potentially live outside the womb). The reason is because with momo's the biggest risk is umbilical cord entanglement, which happens in 100% of all cases to some degree because there is no membrane separating them so they are moving around together in the same living space. Normal identical twins have that separation. My egg split very late and my body never formed that membrane. If the cords entangle too much or knot up and constriction occurs, the babies lose their blood supply and die. Normally, with hospital bedrest they monitor for this and order an emergency c-section at the first sight of a problem. How they monitor is by checking for irregular heart patterns in the twins. Since Twin A already has an irregular heart pattern to begin with there is virtually no way of knowing if a secondary irregularity occurs due to constriction of the cords. Right now we are just praying lots and having faith that God is watching over us and giving us strength to handle whatever is to come. The good news is that the Perinatologist said that the babies seem to be doing fine despite the arrhythmia and are active, which is good. I will update as I have more information.