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Sarabeth and Amelia Irwin were locked in an embrace when they were born at 11:06 a.m. June 11, 2019.
Coinjoined 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, autel maxisys elite $2399
. 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.
Just a few weeks after the first-of-its-kind surgery, Sarabeth sucked on a pacifier, leaning against her father's leg on a blanket in the grass outside their house in Petersburg, about 10 miles north of the Ohio state line in Monroe County.
Amelia spotted a cellphone on the ground and began to crawl for it. She looked up at her big sister, Kennedy, who was running across the lawn, and said, "Sissy."
"Other than taking our word for it, you would almost never know that they were conjoined," said their father, Phil Irwin on a warm mid-September day.
Their mom, Alyson Irwin, smiled, and said, "They're doing great."
But neither Alyson nor Phil could ever have dreamed they'd be able to say that about their twins when they first discovered they were conjoined in late February 2019.
More: Michigan conjoined twins beat the odds the moment they were born: Here's how rare they are
Something about the pregnancy was different, but Alyson, 33, who works in
the
agricultural industry, selling feed and fertilizer to farmers, couldn't pinpoint what it was.
"I thought we were going to have a boy," she said. "It felt different" than her previous pregnancy, when she carried Kennedy, who's now a spunky 3-year-old who loves animals and playing on her backyard jungle gym.
The Irwins looked forward to the 20-week prenatal appointment, set for Feb. 27, 2019. They were eager to see ultrasound images of their growing baby. They agreed they wouldn't find out the gender, and instead wanted to let it be a surprise at delivery.
Still, Alyson was pretty convinced her hunch was right.
"I thought we were just pregnant with a big old boy, so that's why I even bought a boy onesie and everything for a boy," Alyson said.
None of their previous prenatal doctor's visits gave them any inkling that they were having twins or that they might be conjoined.
The ultrasound technician moved the wand around on Alyson's belly, but then quickly excused herself to get the doctor.
"It may have been 5 minutes, but it seemed like forever," before the doctor came into the room, Phil said. "That's when we found out they were conjoined."
"It kind of felt like the worst news you could receive, you know?" Alyson said. "Especially because the statistics are not good.
"They had never seen anything like that before. So they said their hearts were breaking for us . but there wasn't anything they could do."
Their doctor referred them to a high-risk obstetrician, and within 24 hours, the Irwins were in Ann Arbor, meeting with Treadwell at Michigan Medicine.
"I tend to always try to be hopeful, but I also have to be realistic," said Treadwell, who also is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan. "Giving people false hope is not particularly helpful for anyone."
Another ultrasou.

Hospitalizations from the COVID-19 are doubling every two weeks in Michigan, leaders from five health systems announced Thursday, and case numbers are growing "exponentially" at a rate of about 40% per week.
"At that pace, we will top our late spring hospitalization peak this month," said Gerry Anderson, executive chairman of DTE Energy and a leader of the Michigan Economic Recovery Council, who joined the CEOs of five health systems - Beaumont Health, You may also like: Launch car diagnostic. Henry Ford Health System, Spectrum Health, Munson Healthcare, UP Health System - Thursday morning to alert the public of a growing crisis.
"This rate of increase is pressuring health care systems and front-line workers across the state, and that is only going to intensify."
Michigan Health & Hospital Association CEO Brian Peters called on Michiganders to take the crisis seriously, wear masks, practice social distancing and wash their hands to slow the spread of the virus.
"We are squarely in the midst of a public health crisis. . Our hospitals are rapidly filling with COVID patients at a very alarming rate," Peters said. "If this continues in the coming weeks, we will surpass our all-time record high in terms of COVID inpatient hospitalization numbers here in the state of Michigan. And so we are truly here today as a group to call on all Michiganders to do the right thing . to help our front-line caregiver heroes as we combat this terrible virus."
Henry Ford Health System CEO Wright Lassiter III said its hospitals are seeing a 128% rise in COVID-19 admissions.
"We have significant burden in our emergency departments," Lassiter said. "It's very, very clear that we're seeing something different. We are seeing significant escalation of COVID-19 across Michigan.
"While there's no silver bullet for COVID-19, we clearly know that some things work, such as mask wearing, social distancing, hand hygiene."
Spectrum Health President and CEO Tina Freese Decker said the western Michigan hospital system will be at capacity with COVID-19 patients "in a matter of days" Wednesday and announced it is scaling up the number of intensive care unit beds it has to care for critically ill patients, eliminating inpatient medical procedures that require an overnight stay, and is switching as much as it can to virtual visits for routine medical care.
Beaumont CEO John Fox said shutting down the state economy and stopping nonemergency medical procedures isn't what hospital leaders want.
"None of us want to go through the shutdown and the brute force of what happened in the spring," Fox said.
"I don't think any of us want to see a lot of regulation, a drop-down on business and social activities and other things. But we can't be tone deaf to the reality of the virus' massive impact."
He said he hopes government leaders in Michigan heed their call for action.
"Listen to what we're saying, process the out with new approaches that will help all of us in Michigan bend the curve and put this genie back in the bottle," Fox said.
Gar Atchison, CEO and market president of UP Health System in Marquette, agreed, saying, "shutting down does have consequences to public health that I think we all agree we'd like to avoid."
However, if hospitals in Michigan become overwhelmed again with critically ill COVID-19 patients, and don't have the staffing to care for all the people who need it, the hospital leaders said they may have no other choice but to stop offering some nonemergency medical care.
"The short answer is if we begin to be overwhelmed from an inpatient perspective with COVID patients, we have to limit other services and reallocate staff," Lassiter said, noting that Henry Ford is cross-training employees so they can work across departments, including critical care, should they be needed on a COVID unit.
Hospital leaders, Lassiter said, want to continue to be able to provide medical care for other conditions, and don't want to stop elective or non-urgent procedures because of the COVID-19 crisis