It was the second pregnancy for Almorie and Rees Thomas. With a two-year-old son Andreescio already filling their lives, this Dutch St Maarten couple could not dismiss the possibility of multiple births. After all, their families abound with twins.
There are five sets of twins in Rees’ family. His uncle is one of a twin. That uncle in turn is the father of two sets of twins and through one of these he is now grandfather of a set of twins. On the other side, Almorie has four sets of twins in her family.
Yet the news that he was about to become the father of triplets, literally knocked 31-year-old Rees off his feet.
“I just sat down. I was shocked” he told EASY magazine during an interview at the Queen Elizabeth?Hospital two weeks ago, just after he had changed his first set of diapers in the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit where the three additions to his family had been delivered by caesarian section.
A barber by profession Rees related, “The day when my wife was supposed to go to the doctor to get a check-up because she was feeling sick constantly, I could not go with her because I had some customers to cut their hair, so I said to her ‘just go along, he is going to tell you the same thing he would tell me.”
He was not prepared for what he would hear when she returned home.
“When she came back she said she had something to tell me.”
Given the family history, his response was, “What, you are having twins?” Rees’ curiousity was piqued when his wife replied in a calm voice: “No, Sit down.”
By this time, eager to hear what his wife was going to tell him and bursting with anxiety, a somewhat impatient Rees said, “Sit down for what? Talk”.
When Almorie quietly blurted out the word “triplets”, her stunned husband just walked away and dropped into a seat nearby, falling silent while he tried to process what he had just heard.
Almorie had received early warning from the sole paediatrician in practice at Dutch St Maarten’s lone public hospital that he would be unable to single-handedly manage delivery of the three babies and he advised that she would have to go off-island for the delivery.
In the interim, Almorie endured five months of “really bad”morning sickness until, 33 weeks into the pregnancy, she went into premature labour.
Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s head of paediatrics, Clyde Cave, said the hospital was prepared to receive the 25-year-old mother when she was flown there by air ambulance in the wee hours of the morning.
According to Cave, this mother was in “threatened labour”. One of the three triplets, a boy, was in distress and the paediatrician explained “the balance would be whether or not we waited for them to grow and mature and during that time risk something happening to him, or deliver all three early, hoping that we would not be too early and that the right decision would have been made in retrospect.”
Cave headed the team that included three paediatricians, three midwives and three nurses and was responsible for delivering baby girl Lizamor – four pounds and two ounces, Tyryce, four pounds and twelve ounces, and Tyriek at three pounds ten ounces.
“I am scared and happy at the same time,” Almorie, a school-bus driver in her family’s business, told EASY. “It is a lot of babies at once. It is a hard thing,” she added.
Her husband, meanwhile, is still trying to come to grips with the increase in his family. “It comes with a headache . . . a lot of responsibility I have to deal with. I do not even know where to start.” But it is a responsibility which he says he is prepared to undertake. He adores his new sons and daughter, and hates the idea of having to leave one son behind at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to grow a bit stronger.
