I Hate Statistics

Seriously. There are so many stats involved with my pregnancy, and future stuff. I hate it. I need to remind myself that no matter what the stats say, they certainly don't dictate what will happen. Obviously....

Mono/di twins have a 75% survival rate.

They say that after the first trimester, the risk of miscarriage drops significantly, so as each week passed I grew more confident.

With identical twins, there is a risk of Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome, something like 10%.
Only ten percent! Surely we wouldn't be one of the unlucky ones. Babies with TTTS have a very small chance of survival unless there is intervention. Then the survival rate grows to 50%. That stat always frightened me, especially once they started watching our boys more closely for this condition. I had no idea we wouldn't even get that far.

Pregnant women have a 5-8% chance of developing preeclampsia. This risk is higher for first pregnancies, and multiple pregnancies.
This is the one that makes me want to scream. It makes me so angry that I put my confidence in these numbers, assuming I would be in the majority, or on the "good" side. With this experience, my safety net of statistics is GONE. I was in that 5-8%.

Of women who develop pre-e, about 4-12% go on to develop HELLPS.
Me again, "beating" all the odds. I am now a statistic. I don't know what percentage of babies born early because of pre-e die, but I imagine that again, it is the minority. My babies are a statistic. Our story is one of those that others will hear and think, "Gosh, that could never happen to me!" They will think that I am an exception. Maybe they think that I must have done something wrong to cause all of this to happen. Well, I relied on things like taking prenatal vitamins and avoiding caffeine, and in the end it didn't make a bit of difference. And that makes me so, so angry. It also makes me wonder what the heck to do next time? Should I live it up with a cup of coffee each day, do the opposite of the things I did the first time around?

Really, I know that I will continue to try to do my best, follow all the rules, because that's who I am. But it will be so much harder because all the while I will know that in the end, it's possible that none of it will matter. One of the most frustrating things about this whole thing: in the end, I have absolutely no control over whether I will ever have a healthy child. And there isn't a single number that can assure me otherwise.

Now, I have a whole new list of statistics to contend with. Will I "beat the odds"? And if so, will it be in a good way or a bad way?

Women who had pre-e have a higher chance of getting it again than someone who never had the disease.

Women who had pre-e have a 3-4x higher risk of developing heart disease.

Couple who go through an infant loss are 40% more likely to break up.
As the article I read containing this statistic stated, "as if losing a child wasn't enough."

And on top of it all is my on personal statistics: I am 0 for 1 when it comes to pregnancies. I am 0 for 2 when it comes to healthy, living children. I hate statistics.