Parents Patty and Mike Hensel didn't know they were expecting conjoined twins. Patty's pregnancy appeared to be going swimmingly, and there was nothing alarming about any of her ultrasounds. Doctors later concluded that the twins' heads must have been perfectly aligned during each sonogram, giving the appearance of a fetus with just one head instead of two. However, their father may have caught on to a major clue during the pregnancy. In a 2001 piece, Time revealed that Mike had reportedly heard two heartbeats during one sonogram, but his observation was dismissed.
At the time of the twins' birth, Patty was scheduled to undergo a C-section because doctors thought the fetus was in the breech position — a term used to describe when a baby is positioned in the womb bottom-first rather than head-first. When the conjoined twins were pulled out, revealing two heads, their physician, Dr. Joy Westerdahl, admitted that everyone in the delivery room was so stunned that the room fell silent "for about 30 seconds."
Mike wasn't in the room at the time, so when he was finally given the news, he wasn't too happy with the way the message was delivered. "They had a pretty crude way of telling me," he told Time. "They said, 'They've got one body and two heads.'" Patty, who was still under sedation, vaguely remembers the birth experience. She said she heard the word "Siamese" being thrown around the delivery room and perplexed, asked the hospital staff, "I had cats?"
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