We can always identify Frances's artwork because of her penchant for drawing every one of her people with a belly button. How interesting this detail...especially since she and her identical triplet sister, Maria, had so many belly button problems in utero.
Here is a link to Dr. Ramen Chmait's miraculous maternal-fetal surgery that saved our baby girls when they received the fatal diagnosis of Twin-Twin-Transfusion Syndrome.
With shared blood vessels in their shared placenta (monochorionic twins), one baby (Maria) received all of the blood flow and nourishment from her umbilical cord, while the second baby (Frances) received increasingly less and less eventually leaving her with no fluid in her sac. Meanwhile, baby three (Margaret) posed challenges to Dr. Chmait as he had to maneuver around her little ecology in my womb--in the end he had to perform the surgery from the opposite side of the operating table that he normally prefers. Since the laser tools that he uses are so microscopic, any wrong move or laser ablation can prove dangerous if not fatal to the biological system. Because of the microscopic nature of maternal-fetal surgery, I only received local anesthesia since general anesthesia could result in sudden reflexive movements of the mother, which really cannot happen while the surgeon is seeking to laser the shared blood vessels so that they are eventually cut off from one another.
Here is also a link to my CaringBridge site that documented the entire triplets journey.
Umbilical cords, belly buttons, and the symbiotic relationship between moms and babies and twins and triplets is a fascinating, primordial mystery.
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