14 DAY TRIAL // An Ohio woman who gave birth to rare monoamniotic twin girls got the perfect Mother's Day present this year, as she and her husband were able to hold their newborn babies for the first time on Sunday.
After spending nearly two months in hospital, Sarah Thistlethwaite, from Orrville, gave birth to the rare identical “mono mono” twins on Friday. The girls, named Jenna and Jillian, shared the same amniotic sac and placenta in their mom's womb, a case that occurs just once in 10,000 pregnancies, according to doctors.
Daily Mail informs us that the baby girls were delivered by Caesarean section at Akron General Medical Center, and were holding hands when they came to the world.
“They’re already best friends. I can’t believe they were holding hands. That’s amazing,” Sarah said about her bundles of joy, adding that they are the “best Mother's Day present ever.”
Given that they were born prematurely at just 33 weeks and 2 days, the girls will probably spend two to four weeks in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit. At birth, Jenna weighed 4 pounds, 2 ounces (1.87 kg), while Jillian weighed just 3 pounds, 13 ounces (1.72 kg).
Sarah, a middle school math teacher who already has a 15-month-old son, entered the hospital in March, and during the 57 days that she spent there, was hooked up to fetal monitors for 20 hours a day.
“It's hard to be here, (but) we know in the end, we're going to end up with two twin girls and they're going to be healthy and everything is great,” the happy mother said.
Dr. Melissa Mancuso, who helped deliver the twins, explained that monoamniotic twins are the rarest type of twins, and that they present a high risk of birth defects and tangled umbilical cords that could prove fatal for one of the babies.
“This type of twin is at high risk for stillbirth because of cord entanglement. We were just having a discussion about how difficult a decision it is to make, weighing the risk of prematurity versus the risks of entanglement,” she said, according to Yahoo News.
The doctor also added that the C-section procedure went without incidents and both the mother and the girls were doing fine.
Monoamniotic twins are always identical and develop when an embryo does not split until after formation of the amniotic sac. They are very rare and happen in about 1 to 5% of twin pregnancies.