Teacher with Heart Condition Worried Having Twins Could Kill Her. She Was ‘Terrified’ Until the Moment She Gave Birth (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Abby Wood was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy after experiencing premature heartbeats in 2020

• Years later, she and her husband struggled with conceiving a child until they switched to IVF — then they discovered Abby was carrying twins

• Initially concerned that delivering two babies with her heart condition could be fatal for her, Abby successfully gave birth to Simon and Clive in 2024 on Christmas Eve

For Abby Wood, the winter holidays have become a particularly special time in the home that she shares with her husband Chris and their twin boys, Simon and Clivie, who were born on Christmas Eve 2024.

“We had a birthday brunch in the morning,” Abby, 33, tells PEOPLE about the family’s celebration last month. “I was like, ‘I don’t want Christmas decorations. I want it to be their birthday stuff.’ “

“Then Christmas morning, it was just the four of us,” she adds. “I remember sitting with Chris on the floor and we just held hands and got teary just looking at the [boys] with the Christmas tree.”

For Abby, the path to motherhood was complicated by fertility issues and heart health struggles.

When she was in high school, Abby began experiencing some heart flutters. She was told by doctors at the time that there was nothing alarming about them — and sure enough, they went away for years But in 2020, the flutters returned in greater frequency and intensity for Abby, who was now teaching preschool.

“I was like, ‘Okay, it’s probably stress or maybe it’s sugar,’ ” she recalls thinking to herself. “Then I remember walking up the stairs and my heart was beating as if I just sprinted. I was like, ‘I don’t think this is normal.’ ”

Abby went to the cardiologist and tests revealed that over 20 percent of her heartbeats were premature, which was causing her heart to become enlarged and affecting her ability to pump blood to the rest of her body — a condition known as dilated cardiomyopathy.

“I was definitely scared, especially during COVID,” Abby says. “I had to go to all of those appointments by myself.”

She was eventually put on beta blockers, which lessened her premature heartbeats, but she still had to go in for check-ups every three months.

Around this time, Abby met Chris, an engineer for a pharmaceutical company, and they began dating just before the pandemic lockdown. They were “social distance dating” when Abby consulted with her cardiologist about the flutters.

About two years later, they got married and although they both wanted to start a family quickly, she says “it just wasn’t happening.”

“We went through five rounds of IUI (intrauterine insemination), and they all failed,” she shares.

The couple then decided to switch from IUI to in vitro fertilization. A reproductive endocrinologist also recommended that Abby consult with a maternal fetal medicine specialist, who told her that because of her heart, she should just do one embryo transfer, which ended up being successful.

On June 24, 2024, on Chris’ birthday, the couple received a surprise regarding Abby’s pregnancy: she was carrying twins.

Abby was six weeks into her pregnancy when they had the first ultrasound. But what should’ve been joyous news for Abby, however, instead turned into a moment of dread when she thought about a warning she’d previously gotten involving pregnancy and her heart condition.

“I was absolutely terrified because I had been told, ‘If you have twins, it will likely kill you,’ ” Abby remembers.

Due to her high-risk pregnancy, Abby was referred to two specialists from Massachusetts General Hospital — obstetrician Dr. William Barth and cardiologist Dr. Whitney Coppolino, who both felt confident that despite the earlier warning, they’d be able to monitor Abby and keep her and the babies safe.

“When I first met [Dr. Barth], he said, ‘Who told you that you can’t have twins? I truly believe you can do this. We’re going to monitor you heavily,’ ” she recalls. “That really helped. And then when I met with Dr. Coppolino, and she reassured me that I could do this, I finally was able to celebrate that I was pregnant and I was going to get to have my twins, assuming everything went well along the way.”

Beginning in the summer of 2024, Abby traveled from her home in New Hampshire for her appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital in Danvers, Mass., where Barth monitored how the babies were doing.

She also wore a heart monitor for one or two weeks at a time so that Coppolino could check on how her heart was functioning.

Abby stopped physically working on Oct. 31, 2024.

“It became absolutely impossible to teach 20 preschool kids while pregnant with twins with a wonky heart,” she explains. ”My life consisted of coming downstairs in the morning, having breakfast and sleeping on the couch. I needed to eat more calories because I had two babies..So I kind of felt like a garbage disposal.

“I could barely do errands,” she adds. “It was really just growing those babies and surviving.”

In early December 2024, Abby’s doctors said her latest echocardiogram results indicated her heart function had gone down and she was nearing early heart failure.

She was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was monitored and had her beta blockers changed, before she was able to return home a few days later with a livefeed heart monitor.

By the time she arrived at the hospital for her C-section on Christas Eve, Abby felt terrified.

“I was so scared texting my family like, ‘I love you. Take care of Chris and the boys if I die,’ “ she says. “And they’re like, ‘You’re going to be fine.’ But I was really scared.”

“Every person that I had clearly could read that on my face, but they also took such good care of me,” she says. Striking a positive note, she also remembered hugging her tummy and “saying to the boys, ‘Okay, I’m going to meet you soon.’ “

The delivery ended up normal. Clive emerged first at 4 lbs., 15 oz., followed by Simon, who was born weighing 5 lbs., 2 oz.

The following morning, Abby was brought to the specialty care area to see the twins.

“That was so magical,” she says. “And it was Christmas morning, so it couldn’t have been any more special. They [the twins] had little Santa hats on and they were wrapped like little burritos.”

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More than a year after their births, Simon and Clive are walking, running and climbing, Abby says — and while she experienced more heart flutters last fall, an electrophysiologist performed an ablation to remedy that.

Now she says she definitely feels “less flutters and skipped beats” and that her heart has made a big improvement from where it was.

Looking back at her previous heart and fertility challenges, Abby says there were times she thought she would never become pregnant — now, having everybody happy and healthy together at home is “all I could ever ask for.”

She contemplates returning to teaching but is happy at the moment being at home with the boys.

“I can barely remember life before them,” she says. “[Chris and I] lived in this house for maybe a year before I got pregnant. It feels like home now, especially now that they’re running. You can hear the little feet pitter-pattering everywhere and the giggles. I mean, it’s a dream come true.”

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