Just A Little Bickering {Styles Twins}

Before: Part One

Anne couldn't believe what the doctors were telling her, not a single word. As one twin was placed in her arms, she couldn't help but think of the other fighting for his life in the NICU. One healthy, one near death. It's not fair, she thought, tears in her eyes as the baby in her arms pulled on a fallen piece of hair within his reaching distance.

When Anne had found herself pregnant with identical twin boys, the word ecstatic couldn't even come to describing how she felt. Who doesn't want twins? Of course, it took a while to sink in that there would need to be twice as many purchases and twice as many hours of sleep lost, but even when she thought about those unpleasant factors, it was all worth it. The nursery down the hall from her and her husband, Des's, room was soon filled to the brim with little blue and green things: shoes, clothes, toys, furniture, everything, and nothing could destroy the happiness those twins brought to them even before their birth.

Anne grew and grew until today, the first of February, when the Styles twins decided they no longer wanted to live in their tight little home; it must have been exceptionally cramped considering two babies were squeezed into the small quarters. Everyone was extremely excited for the twins' arrival, especially Gemma, their four year old sister. She'd been saying all the way to the hospital how she was going to be the best big sister ever, but only if they didn't smell too bad like the boys at her daycare center.

Everything was fine, that is, until Hayden was born. Harry was the first twin and came out with lungs of steel, screaming from his first breath. He'd been seven pounds and eight ounces. Hayden was next. The doctors had been expecting him to be slightly lighter than Harry. The scans Anne had a month earlier showed Hayden being a little smaller than his now older brother, but they never could have predicted this.

Little Hayden Alexander Styles was born at 12:47 p.m., an exact hour after his older brother, and three pounds lighter. Both the twins had been diagnosed with a very mild form of Acute Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome, or TTTS as the doctors called it, at birth, where one twin has a greater blood and nutrient circulation causing the other to be deprived of many essentials. The doctors had explained that the lack of nutrients had caused Hayden to be less developed than Harry, and his blood pressure was far too low. They feared his tiny little heart would give out before he saw his first sunset.

Of course, the syndrome had also affected Harry. He'd been born with high blood pressure, but after a full heart checkup it had been decided that his heart was functioning of perfectly with the exception of a small heart murmur, and only two hours after his birth, he passed all of his tests with flying colors and was returned to Anne.

Hayden hadn't been so lucky. Along with TTTS, he was born with minor Spina Bifida, a birth defect where the vertebrae of the spine does not meet and cover the spinal cord, and also a tethered spinal cord, where his spinal cord had been fused to bone in his lower back. He'd been slightly lucky though; most cases of Spina Bifida were much more severe than what Hayden had. It was the tethered cord combined with the Spina Bifida that had caused the problems.

He'd never walk, never swim, never dance. He'd never be a normal child, not really. Without releasing his spinal cord from the bone surrounding it, he'd be paralyzed from possibly as far as the upper chest down for his entire life. The only solution was surgery, one that could cause his weak heart to give out. There was no nerve damage that they saw, so the procedure could be successful in preventing paralysis, if done just right.