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The monsters lumbering across my screen were disturbing; what evil demons gave birth to such a cast of unsavory circus sideshow characters? Were they And then, I realized that I'd better turn off the first night of the Republican National Convention, because it was time to change the channel to the two-episode season premiere of TLC's conjoined twins docu-reality show, Abby and Brittany.
The women referred to in the show's title are 22 year-old conjoined twins, Abby and Brittany Hensel. The scientific term for their condition is dicephalic parapagus twins. I find the "dicephalic" part of the term to be a bit odd. It implies that there exist in this world monocephalic parapagus twins.
One-headed twins? They have two arms and two legs, arranged in such a manner as to give the physical appearance of one human body with two heads. Abby and Brittany share a ribcage, liver, colon, and one pair of breasts. Despite each having their own heart, the twins share a circulatory system. Similarly, their separate stomachs empty into a shared large intestine and rectum.
They also share a reproductive system. This expositional information regarding the girls' physiology is all rattled off in a five second testimonial clip from one of the girls' roommates, after which all manner of factual information is absent from the shows.
In fact, we are not granted any background information about the twins' birth, family, or childhood at all. New York Daily News. Facts Verse. Aj TV. Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash. The UK hosts one of the world's most successful television industries. In conversation, the twins are clearly distinct persons, with distinct likes and dislikes.
Their preferences in food, clothing color, etc. Some of their clothes are altered by their seamstress so that they have two separate necklines in order to emphasize their individuality. They will usually have separate meals, but sometimes will share a single meal for the sake of convenience e. Abigail is better at mathematics and Brittany is better at writing. For tasks such as responding to e-mail, they type and respond as one, anticipating each other's feelings with little verbal communication between them.
In such cases as the latter, their choice of grammatical person is to use the first person singular out of habit when they agree, but when their responses do differ, they use their names in the third person singular. There is some concern about their ability to have continued good health because only four known sets of conjoined twins who share an undivided torso and two legs have ever survived into adulthood, and most have congenital heart defects or other organ anomalies.
None have shown up in the Hensels' case. They have so far had no desire to make themselves available for any medical studies. They intend to make a rather limited number of media appearances in the future, primarily just to appease the world's curiosity and to reduce the number of people who might otherwise be taken aback by their unusual body configuration.
They intensely dislike being stared at or photographed by strangers while going about their private lives. They hope that by providing some information about themselves they will be able to lead otherwise fairly typical social lives as together they continue to make new friends.
In April , the twins were featured on the cover of Life under the caption "One Body, Two Souls", and their daily lifestyle was depicted in the corresponding article titled The Hensels' Summer. Life followed up with another story in September In , an updated story of them at age 11 filmed in was published in Time and again in Life.
They appeared in a follow-up documentary on The Learning Channel on December 17, filmed around the time of their 16th birthday, in which they discuss dealing with puberty and getting their driver's licenses. In the summer of , they had a vacation in Texas at the home of a family whose dicephalus twin girls had died at a few hours old. Help Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Namespaces Article Discussion. Views Read Edit View history.
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