Alabama woman Kelsey Hatcher is unusual enough to start with, blessed with the medical anomaly of two uteruses, each with a cervix.
But now, with a baby in each, she is a certified maternal miracle.
Hatcher and her husband Caleb are busy working parents to three children aged 2, 4 and 7 and thought their roster was full until they fell pregnant again earlier this year.
But when Hatcher went for her first ultrasound, she received some amazing news - and had to break it to her unsuspecting husband.
“I said, well, there’s two of them in there. And he said, ‘you’re lying’. I said, no, I’m not,” Hatcher told WVTM news.
Kelsey said her husband Caleb was shocked by the news. Photo / @doubleuhatchlings
But the real shock was the news that these were no ordinary twins and she was instead carrying the babies in two uteruses.
While Hatcher had known for some time that she had two wombs, the chance of becoming pregnant in both is minute and the dual pregnancies are now considered high-risk.
Dr. Richard Davis, a specialist in high-risk pregnancies, told WVTM:“A double cervix or double uteruses way under 1 per cent, maybe three per 1000 women might have that. And then the probability of you having a twin in each horn is really crazy.”
The babies, both girls, are both healthy and technically due on Christmas Day - but with each growing in their own uterus there is no guarantee that contractions won’t start hours apart.
Or days, or even weeks.
“So when she goes into labour, if she does, then we will have to monitor each uterus and see which one’s contracting and if they’re doing sort of almost the same or they’re different,” Davis said.
The two babies are a medical anomaly. Photo / @doubleuhatchlings
Hatcher’s obstetrician gynecologist, Dr Shweta Patel, told Good Morning America that the situation was “unpredictable”.
“That’s why we’ve had a lot of conversations with [Hatcher] kind of talking about the different scenarios that could happen, where she could have a vaginal delivery with both babies, she could have a vaginal delivery with one and a C-section with the other, or maybe end up having a C-section for both of them.
“There’s no true expert out there who knows how to manage a patient with two uteruses and two babies, with one in each uterus.”
Asked if the girls were technically siblings or twins, Patel replied: “I think medically, this is such a rare thing that we don’t have a better way of describing it besides still calling them twins.”
No matter how they’re described, the two new arrivals will mean the busy parents will be looking after five kids under eight years of age.
“We’re grateful for the blessings for sure. But this will definitely be the end,” Hatcher said.
