Taylor Muhl realized that her skin was unique when she was a little girl at dance class.
She would look at all the other children and notice that her belly looked different than theirs.
Her own belly was two different colors, one on each side, split by a perfectly straight line right down the middle.
When she asked her mom about it, she was told it was just a birthmark.
That didn’t turn out to be the whole story.
Growing signs
When Taylor was small, she kept asking her mother if she had a twin. Her mom assured her that she was an only child. She remembered giving birth to one baby – and that was that.
There was the small detail of her mom having never had an ultrasound throughout the pregnancy, having preferred to go the natural route, complete with midwives and a home birth.
However, giving birth to one baby is a pretty big indicator that the baby is not a twin.
That didn’t stop Taylor from wanting a twin. She even went as far as to make sure that she and her friends dressed exactly alike. She was that obsessed about it.
And medical problems
By the time she entered high school, Taylor was already dealing with an unusual amount of medical problems.
She saw a multitude of doctors and went through everything from MRIs to blood tests in an attempt to find out why she was always getting sick and had so many signs of someone with an autoimmune disorder.
No one could figure out what was going wrong with her health.
Information from an unlikely source
Taylor was watching a show one day when a medical mystery was highlighted. It was a woman with chimerism, a condition that is so rare that only around a hundred cases have ever been documented in humans.
It seems like a statistical improbability, and yet Taylor just kept looking at the woman’s stomach. It was the same as hers.
The next time she was at the doctor’s with a medical problem, which wasn’t long after, she told the doctor about the condition she had seen on the show and mentioned that she had the same type of birthmark. He asked to look at it.
When she showed him the birthmark, he was amazed.
He quickly ordered testing, and it was confirmed. He told Taylor that she has tetragametic chimerism. It can occur when there are two separate fertilized eggs, and one absorbs the other.
Because of this, Taylor has two blood types and even two immune systems. She also has two sets of DNA – hers and her twin’s.
Implications
Knowing that she has chimerism has helped Taylor to understand so much about herself – both emotionally as well as physically. She now understands why she always wanted a twin.
It has also helped doctors to better understand why her immune system is acting the way it is. It sees her twin’s DNA and cells as foreign and is battling them constantly, leaving her prone to catching every cold and flu virus there is.
It also helps to explain things like why she has a double tooth only on one side of her mouth, why she has so many allergies, and also why everything on one side of her body is slightly larger.
She isn’t letting it stop her
Taylor promotes body positivity and shares her story with the world. The health complications do stop her from going as fast as she would like to, but she is determined and motivated. If she wants to do something, there is no doubt – she will do it.
You can hear more about her story in the video below:
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