When Shelley and Adams’ Greg Tucker learned during a routine ultrasound that Shelley was pregnant with conjoined twins, they were shocked.
Shelley wrote on a blog that “they have no idea what it means”
Shelly was already five months pregnant when an obstetrician told the couple the girls might not be successfully separated and advised them to terminate the pregnancy.
Shelley told ABC News, “As he was telling me, I literally felt the girls kicking me in the stomach and I realized that was not possible.”
The couple, who were already parents to a son, went to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) for a second opinion.
The twins were attached in the lower chest and abdomen and “shared the chest wall, diaphragm, pericardium, and liver,” according to the CHOP website.
Since the girls’ hearts are completely separated, CHOP’s doctors decided the twins could be separated.
Shelley Allison and Amelia gave birth in March 2011 via C-section at CHOP.
The twins then spent the next few months in the hospital, where they had skin expanders inserted to “increase the available area of skin to cover exposed tissue after [separation] surgery”.
On November 7, 2012, when the twins were 8 months old, they underwent a seven-hour operation.
“The moment you become two is very tragic,” said Holly Headrick, pediatric surgeon and pediatric thoracic and fetal surgeon at CHOP, who led the surgical team.
“Eventually the surgeons came out and told us they were separated. The weight of the world was on our shoulders. The first time I saw them as two separate girls was truly the most amazing feeling,” Shelley said.
