DETROIT – Sarabeth and Amelia Irwin were locked in an embrace when they were born at 11:06 a.m. June 11, 2019.
Conjoined from their chests to their bellies, the identical twins' arms wrapped around one another as they were carefully lifted from their mother's womb at Michigan Medicine's Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, said Dr. Marcie Treadwell, director of Michigan Medicine’s Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment Center.
About 14 months later, the twins returned to Ann Arbor, where they underwent an 11-hour surgery Aug. 5 at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, becoming the first known set of conjoined twins to be successfully separated in Michigan.
"'They're so rare," said Treadwell, explaining that just 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 250,000 pregnancies involve conjoined twins. Few survive delivery, and even fewer live long enough to be discharged from the hospital and go home, like Sarabeth and Amelia did.
Two teams of surgeons — one for each girl — and more than a dozen other medical staff spent months planning how they'd safely separate Sarabeth and Amelia, giving them a chance at independent lives.
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