Rare, Identical Twins Born Weeks Apart After Miraculous Delivery

Link and Logan Gorveatt are identical twins. However, the two boys were born 18 days apart, thanks to a very unusual delivery.

The mother of the twins, Holli Gorveatt, had gone into early labor in September due to the weight of the twins on her cervix, according to ABC News.

"It's rather like having two plants growing out of the same pot," said Dr. Martin Walker of Evergreen Health Medical. "They send their umbilical cords down into the placenta, the 'roots' go out through the placenta, these are the blood vessels. And where they touch each other, they join together and they allow blood to flow freely between babies.

"All identical twins sharing a placenta have these connections," he added. "About 20 percent of them get into a situation where one baby gives the other baby more blood than he gets back. So, you have a situation where one baby becomes anemic and weak from blood loss and the other baby becomes over stuffed with blood, bloated and goes into heart failure."

Because of this problem, doctors at the hospital had to deliver one twin at just 23 weeks. Link was born on Tuesday, Sept. 29. She and husband Nick Gorveatt welcomed their second twin, Logan, on Saturday, according to Fox News.

The medical term for the twins problem was referred to as a twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome in utero, which occurs when the blood supply of one twin moves to the other's via the babies shared placenta, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). One twin loses blood and is born much smaller than the other while the other twin remains at risk of suffering cardiac failure from high blood volume.

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