By now you’ve probably at least seen the Hensel twins in the media. The conjoined twins, Abby and Brittany Hensel, have been all over TV.
They’ve been on The Oprah Winfrey Show and had their own series titled Joined for Life and TLC’s Abby & Brittany.
They are nationally known and people all over the world are inspired by their story. A story that is quite amazing.
For starters, conjoined twins are super rare. They occur one in every 189,000 births. But Abby and Brittany are dicephalic parapagus twins, which means they have two heads and one torso,
This is an even rarer occurrence that happens with only 11 percent of conjoined twins.
The twins each have their own set of organs in the upper half of his body, so two hearts, four lungs, and two stomachs. But they share their lower organs and each twin can control each side of their own body.
Their TLC series showed how these girls managed to perform everyday tasks including each of these girls having to pass a road test. In order to drive, Abby controls the devices on the right side of the steering wheel and Brittany on the left.
They work together to steer the car.
While having two people steering one car would seem difficult, the twins have been learned to work in unison since they were little. They had to learn how to coordinate their movements in order to clap, walk, swim, eat, and write.
“They are two different girls, but yet they are able to work together to do the basic functions that I do every day that I take for granted,” friend to the sisters Cari Hohncke told BBC.
While they have to work together to do most things, they are very much their own person with their own personalities.
“We definitely have different styles,” Abby said. “Brittany’s a lot more like neutrals and pearls and stuff like that and I would rather have it be more fun and bright and colourful.”
Their bodies also respond to things differently.
Brittany feels jittery after a few cups of coffee and Abby is fine with it.
“I can be a totally different temperature than Brittany would be and a lot of times our hands are different temperatures, so I get super-hot way faster,” Abby says.
The girls both graduated from Bethel University and each got their teaching license.
They share a fifth-grade classroom in public school an hour from their hometown in Minnesota.
They now live low-key lives out of the spotlight.
“I don’t think there’s anything that they won’t try or something that they couldn’t be able to do if they really wanted to,” Paul Good, principal of the school where Abby and Brittany work, said. “To bring that to children, especially kids who might be struggling, that’s very special, that’s learned through lived example.”
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
