My name’s Eva.
My name’s Erica.
Vanderball, me and miracle are stuck together when we were born.
We have been separated for a long time.
Eva is very talkative, outspoken, hard-headed, she just.
She’s always smiling.
Erica is the happy-go-lucky.
They’re both happy-go-lucky girls.
They’re very smart.
They’re very smart little girls.
Me and Erica were stuck together when we were born.
Do you remember being together?
No, yes, i don’t ever.
Always took my toy and put it in her mouth.
So the girls were born conjoined, August 10th 2014..
They were connected from the bottom rib cage to the pelvis.
They shared a bladder and they shared a third leg.
My pregnancy with the twins was a pretty big surprise to all of us.
When he said your babies are conjoined, i must have liked space.
I just i wasn’t grasping it.
The risk of delivering the twins.
It was 30 chance of survival and for us making the decision of bringing them into this world and letting them come as far as they could that we were willing to do.
Purple or star.
Okay, come on.
We were willing to accept them if they couldn’t separate them, except in the way they were supposed to be.
But when given the opportunity to separate them, we took that opportunity.
What are you doing?
We came to the conclusion that we definitely want them to have that individuality where they have two separate lives.
The doctor’s goals were to make them grow.
Have them grow before we take that next step of separating them.
So if i was the bigger baby of the two, they were about five pounds conjoined.
When they were born, the doctors were noticing how Erica was fading into Eva, into her body, and as time went on, you saw Erica shrinking into Eva and Eva was becoming this little four pound baby, three pound baby.
It looked like she looked like the the baby and Erica looked like the attached person to her.
When the girls were separated, they were 16 months and that day i felt peace.
We had a lot of family.
We had a lot of support.
People that didn’t know us were reaching out.
We had a lot of family there.
It was a team of 50 doctors, nurses, any and anesthesiologist.
Yeah, It was about 17- 18 hours.
It was a beautiful day when they told us: you know, we have, you have two girls.
You know you have two babies.
So i used to call it the crab crawl the way they they moved when they were first conjoined.
Now they just Scoot.
They scoot pretty fast, since the girls have been separated.
They have adapted very well.
They love doing their own thing.
They have their individual personalities.
They love different things, which again i stress to them that it’s okay to be different.
I love reading, like Belle.
She likes books, so he likes same thing.
I like playing basketball.
So we’re putting a patch on.
The brain is not connecting to her right eye, so it’s making her left eye work harder.
So what we’re doing is relaxing the left eye.
So we cover, we patch the left eye, the good eye, so she can, um, use her right eye.
They’re doing great with their prosthesis.
They’re doing great.
Just walking, you know, hopping is what i call it.
So again, there is no plans in the near future for any type of surgery for the girls.
So my hopes, our hopes for the future for the girls, is that they succeed in anything that they do, that they know that just because they’re a little different, it doesn’t make them any less stronger than the next person.
What do you like to do?
Um, i want to play basketball, just like Kobe Bryant i like to do when i grow up to be a vet.
We have had our moments are situations where there are people that don’t understand why i brought them into this world.
There have been comments made and i say we each have our own, you know- decisions why we choose to bring someone into a world.
Our choice was to have these two little ones you know and give them opportunity.
I think just the decision of bringing them into this world was the best decision ever you.