My Experience

Once a week for the last four weeks of my pregnancy with twins I was required to check in at my hospital for what they call a “non-stress test.” Sort of a misnomer if you ask me because as far as I can tell they are actually introducing some stress into the fetuses’ environments to see how they react.

I would go into a room with a bunch of beds and monitors and they would draw a curtain around me. Then they would hook up heart monitors to my belly and have me drink a cup of juice to introduce sugar into the fetal blood to get them active while they checked the fetuses’ heart rates and also did a rudimentary ultrasound to check the amount of fluid in the amniotic sacs and that everyone was developing as expected. I was required to sit there about 20 minutes so they could gather enough data, so I always got to make it through a magazine or chapter in a book.