Atlanta Couple’s Conjoined Twin Daughters, Fused at the Heart, Touch Lives in Their 1-Hour Journey ‘A Gift from God’
Breana Dell could only hold her twin babies, Amelia Jane and Elhora Auri, for an hour after they were born on February 29. But, she said, every minute was full of “peace” and “awe.”
That was three months before. When she was 17 weeks pregnant, she and her husband Matthew Dell got an ultrasound to find out what gender their baby was.
They were shocked to see that the single beating they saw on the monitor belonged to two girls. At the torso, the twins were joined together.
Dell, 24, a stay-at-home mom, told Fox News Digital over the phone, “Everything changed in that moment.”
“I started to panic and cry.”
It was very unlikely that the couple would be able to separate the twins, which meant that neither would have a good chance of living.
“Because of how their heart was conjoined, it would just be too complicated,” he said.
The couple went to many doctors for MRIs and other tests.
“It was lots and lots of appointments, in hopes that they would be wrong and that something could be done — but it didn’t work out that way,” he said.
A doctor told the parents-to-be a month before the twins were born that they would probably not make it and that there would be no way to separate them.
It was like their hearts were one,” Dell said. “A lot of people asked me, ‘Can’t you just save one of them?'” They couldn’t live without each other, so it wasn’t possible.
When the Dells heard that bad news, they focused on getting ready for delivery and all the possible results they could face.
“Northside Hospital [in Atlanta] was amazing,” he said. “They were so kind and considerate of our situation and our family.”
Dell had an already one-year-old son named Dallas. She was told she could have an abortion, but she said it was “never even a thought.”
“Our thought process was always, ‘What can we do to save them and keep them,’” she shared.
“Our faith was the biggest factor in the decision we made,” she said. “I don’t know how anybody could get through a situation like that without having faith.”
Dell said that she thinks the twins were a gift from God and that they were born for a reason.
“When I was first told that they were conjoined, it was just this bubble of devastation, sadness, confusion, uncertainty and fear,” she said.
“But nobody can predict the future perfectly, and you just never know what the outcome will be.”
But Dell said she had a lot of mental problems as the pregnancy went on.
She said, “I had terrible anxiety attacks.” “I knew what the outcome would be — but you can’t really prepare yourself for that.”
She said, “Toward the end of my pregnancy, I had severe brain fog, my stomach was in knots, and I knew my body was trying to tell me, ‘Hey, you’re not OK.”
Elhora Auri Dell and Amelia Jane Dell were born on February 29 at 7:37 a.m.
Each one was 3.5 pounds.
The ultrasounds showed the girls with their arms around each other, which is how they were when they were born.
“It was actually really sweet the way they were conjoined — they were holding each other from the moment they were alive, just in a big hug,” he said.
“It was amazing to see how their little bodies were still working,” she said.
“They didn’t move or open their eyes much, but it made me feel better to know they were there and that I was holding them alive.” It’s impossible for me not to meet them.
Conjoined twins are very rare. Only one in every 50,000 to 200,000 births has them.
StatPearls, a medical website from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, says the disease happens when a single fertilized egg splits into two embryos more than 13 days after it was fertilized.
They happen about three times more often to girls than to boys.