– A gnawing feeling that there’s something missing in your life. Even when a room is filled with people, you can feel like you’re completely alone, all the time, anywhere. Lost Twin Syndrome comes with these symptoms: Luckily, there’s a lot of awareness now, so people don’t have to go through it alone. But until today, most psychiatrists still don’t know what to do with the mental consequences that Lost Twin Syndrome brings. The physical part of Lost Twin Syndrome was discovered and accepted in mainstream society in the 80’s. This experience brings some psychological consequences to the surviving child, which we call Lost Twin Syndrome. Other times, the mother doesn’t bleed and the tissue of the twin gets absorbed by the living child. Sometimes the mother has an unexplainable bleeding, releasing the twin in the process.

But mostly one of the baby’s don’t survive the first few weeks. Many pregnancy’s start out being a twin pregnancy. But how do you deal with something like that? And how do you help a 9 years old child with all of this? What is Lost Twin Syndrome? Recognizing the signs wasn’t the hard part. We were already familiar with Lost Twin Syndrome, something a lot of surviving twins go through. She cried a lot during that time and was buried under a lot of unexplainable feelings, probably triggered by the hormones of prepuberty. She felt like she was always alone, even with friends and family around her perfectionism got worse she also felt like something was missing, she couldn’t explain it, but it was a huge burden to carry around for her. When Troia was 9 years old, things went downhill with her. We would never know for sure, but the entire picture was right. Yes, there was a big chance that we lost a twin baby. Talking to our gynaecologist two weeks later, confirmed what we already thought. There’s no way that it was “just a bleeding”. What happened? We were so sure that we lost our baby. The days after, we were filled with different feelings, all tangled together. We still had our baby! She was still there! Relieve filled us, a big smile took hold of that moment. Pfew, our baby was still there! It was “just” a bleeding. But as soon as we the machine touched my belly, we could here a strong, beautiful heartbeat. In the hospital, they prepared us for an ultrasound. I knew I lost my baby, I felt her soul leaving my body. The energy hanging around us was one of loss and despair. When I started bleeding heavily that evening, we both thought that we lost the baby. We were 8 weeks pregnant by that time, so not thát far along. After my husband came home from work, we started to rewind for the evening. But when Troia grew older, Lost Twin Syndrome came knocking on her door… it was time to truly embrace Maya* as a part of our family. The first few years, we didn’t think it was ok to openly remember her, so we didn’t. It’s a special day for our family, one to remember, mourn, celebrate and be grateful about. Even though this happened 15 years ago, we still remember her every single year on this day. Today, October 5 th, we remember the day we had to give back the twin sister of our oldest daughter to the Universe.

Lost twins and hysterectomy