Baffling doctors with their extraordinary will to survive, a pair of so-called "miracle twins" beat some pretty staggering odds to be born into this world -- albeit a whopping eight days apart.
Mom Edonna Bean, of Bermuda, said that though her pregnancy with the twins began well, things "spiraled downhill" in her second trimester. According to CTV News, Bean was rushed to a hospital in Bermuda during her 18th week after the amniotic sac of one of the twins ruptured. At the time, doctors warned her she would likely miscarry.
“The emergency department in Bermuda -- they were like, ‘Let’s focus on twin B, because twin A’s not going to survive,’" Bean told Global News.
The tenacious mom, however, refused to give up on her baby.
"I was saying to myself, you know, ‘How can they say that when he’s still breathing, his heart’s still going?’" she said. "And I said to [my unborn child], ‘You know as long as you’re fighting, so am I.’”
And fought they both did. The Bermuda hospital could not accommodate Bean and her twins, so the mom was airlifted to IWK Health Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada, which specializes in pediatric and obstetric care. There, on Nov. 25, Emyr was born. He weighed just 1 pound, 14 ounces at birth, Global News reports.
“Twin B…actually kept my uterus up enough to allow Emyr to still live as long as he did. He lasted 8 weeks without amniotic fluid,” the twins' mom told the outlet.
Though the birth of Emyr (whom his mom has called a "little miracle") was a welcome relief, Bean and the other twin weren't out of the woods just yet. Doctors suspected that Bean had contracted an infection after giving birth, and they were worried about the well-being of her other son. Twin B also seemed unwilling to leave the womb, hanging out in there for more than a week after his brother's departure.
But on Dec. 3, Esai Bean was born by emergency C-section. About three months premature like his brother, he weighed 2 pounds, 7 ounces at birth. Fortunately, both newborns are said to be doing very well in IWK's neonatal intensive care unit despite all the earlier complications.
"I’m honestly speechless when I look at these two children to know just weeks ago their future looked so grim and now they’re here and thriving,” the twins' mom told Bermudan news outlet the Royal Gazette, adding that her boys have been "blowing the doctors' minds" with their good health.
Dr. Michiel van den Hof, a maternal fetal medical specialist at IWK, told CTV that it's very rare for one twin to be born separately from the other (known as delayed interval delivery). He said he's only seen it happen once before in his 20 years at IWK.
Still, though eight days is a long time for a pair of twins to be born apart, other twins have been born with more time between them. In 2012, Irish mom Maria Jones-Elliot gave birth to twins 87 days apart. According to the Associated Press, New Orleans mom Simone Keys gave birth to twins Timothy and Celeste 95 days apart in the 1990s.