Baby’s death a deep, permanent pain that doesn’t ease

THE PARENTS: Alexis Porter, 31, and Andrew Porter, 32, of Audubon, N.J.

THE KIDS: Edgar Thomas, 2; Valerie Ann, born June 7, 2022; Adeline Kelly, born June 7, 2022, died June 8

HOW IT BEGAN: Both Alexis and Andrew attended college in Baltimore — she at Johns Hopkins, he at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County — and met at a dance club called Soundstage.

The call came at 11 p.m., from Alexis’ phone: a nurse at Virtua Voorhees Hospital, her voice tight. “Can you get over here soon? Your wife is in the OR right now.”

It was week 27 of her pregnancy, and Alexis had been in the hospital for five days, hoping to keep their twins in utero until their chances of survival outside the womb improved.

They were identical girls, at extremely high risk because they were monoamniotic monochorionic twins — ”mono mono” in common parlance — meaning they shared one amniotic sac and placenta. It’s a rare condition that can lead to cord entanglement, cord compression, and a daunting list of other dangers.

Alexis and Andrew learned all this at the 12-week ultrasound. “The doctor poked her head into the next patient’s room and said, ‘It’s going to be 45 minutes until I see you,’” Alexis remembers. “That’s when my heart dropped.”

They’d barely begun to wrap their minds around the fact of twins. At the 10-week ultrasound, Andrew recalls thinking, “That monitor looks really busy. Then the doctor said, ‘Wait a minute. Hold on. There are two in here.’ ”

To Alexis, the pregnancy already felt different from her textbook-ordinary first, the one that produced their son, Edgar, born a month before the pandemic began. That time, “there were no complications,” she says. “I was pretty ignorant about what could go wrong.”

With the twins, she recalls, “I could barely eat anything. I was actually throwing up throughout the first trimester, and even most of the second.” She read a book on twins and scrutinized that first ultrasound, looking for a membrane that would indicate there were two amniotic sacs.

“When we found out what kind of twins they were, from that point forward, that’s when it became really hard,” she says.

Alexis, a chemical engineer, was able to work from home; Andrew is a stay-at-home dad. They found a mono mono twin Facebook group. They started going to church more often. “Every [prenatal] appointment was a blessing and a curse,” Alexis says. “I looked forward to learning that they were OK, but before they put the ultrasound wand up and found two heartbeats, we were holding our breath.”

The couple always knew they wanted children — ”more than one, less than six,” Andrew says — and became pregnant for the first time less than a year after their 2018 wedding. Their temperaments were a yin-yang, Andrew’s laid-back demeanor a contrast to Alexis’ type-A focus.

As the months passed and they learned more about the risks facing mono mono twins — failure to thrive in utero, twin-to-twin transfusion, congenital heart defects — Andrew tried to remain optimistic. They taught Edgar to say, “Where are the babies?” and point to his mother’s belly.

And they hoped, when Alexis entered the hospital on June 2, that she would remain there, comfortably, for five weeks, until labor could be safely induced. They decorated the room with family photographs; friends brought games and puzzles.

Then came the urgent 11 p.m. call. Andrew phoned a neighbor to stay with Edgar, then rushed to the hospital, hastily pulled on scrubs, and entered an operating room to find his wife under general anesthesia following an emergency C-section, ordered because one baby’s heart rate had decelerated dangerously.

The healthier twin — weighing one pound, 14 ounces — had already been whisked to the NICU. The other was in a bassinet ringed with doctors and nurses.

“They broke the news slowly,” he says. “I learned she wasn’t going to survive through the night.” Andrew held Adeline; she lived for 82 minutes. Alexis emerged from anesthesia to learn that their daughter had died.

It was another few hours until they could see Valerie, on oxygen support, an IV line in her umbilical, a minuscule infant in a tangle of monitors. It was eight days until they were allowed to hold her.

And once Andrew left the hospital, Alexis felt haunted. “I could hear the sound of people in rooms next to me, the sounds of their babies’ heartbeats. I needed to immediately start pumping breast milk. It felt isolating.”

Departing the hospital without their daughters — ”one in the hospital morgue and the other in the NICU,” Alexis says — was excruciating. The next weeks were a blur of grief, anxiety, and several calamities that, in light of a child’s death, felt like mere nuisances: an accident that totaled Alexis’ car (but left her unscathed) and a misstep at a playground that left her with a broken ankle.

Between those events was Adeline’s funeral, a solemn ceremony in the chapel of St. Vincent Pallotti in Haddon Heights. They played “Ave Maria.” In Andrew’s eulogy, he talked about love. They clung to the few tangible keepsakes they had: a couple of hospital photographs of Adeline, a tiny teddy bear that had fit in the palm of her hand, an angel pin.

Valerie remained in the NICU for four months; when she came home, she still had a nasogastric tube that Andrew and Alexis learned to insert and clean, measuring the breast milk Alexis pumped and feeding the baby every two hours.

They returned the double stroller, the twin bassinet. They sought help from therapists and infant loss support groups. They endured the comments from people who tried to find a positive glimmer in their loss.

“We go to the grocery store and do normal things and look fine, but we’re not fine,” Alexis says. “Every happy moment is bittersweet, because we’re always imagining the two of them.”

Adeline’s death marked an indelible shift in everything they did and thought. “I no longer believe that everything happens for a reason,” Alexis says. “There is no silver lining, no positive spin. A child dying creates this deep, permanent pain in your soul. It isn’t any less because we have a living son and daughter.”