Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
NEW YORK -- Alison Camp was 19-years-old when she learned she'd been born with a rare condition, affecting perhaps only one to two percent of women, called Uterine Didelphys.
It means she has two uteruses, each attached to one fallopian tube and one ovary.
Women with this condition can bear children. In fact, Alison and her husband Tim Camp already had two by the time they learned they were pregnant again.
"We were joking around with my regular OB that on Grey's Anatomy there was a woman who had a baby in each uterus, and that could happen to me and we thought that was just hilarious," Alison said.
That stopped being a joke when she had an ultra sound in her 11th week.
"She said well, here's the baby in the right uterus and here's the heart beat and everything looks great. So I just scan around, and here's the baby in the left uterus," Alison said. "And at that point we both started swearing and I thought he was going to pass out."
Alison says her research indicates that prior to this, there had only been 73 documented cases in the world like hers.
"Very rare. I've never seen it, and I've been doing medicine for 40 years," said Dr. Shailini Singh, the maternal-fetal medicine doctor who supervised Camp's high- risk pregnancy at a women and children's hospital
In October the decision was made to deliver the Camp's two sons 14 weeks prematurely when they weighed a mere pound and a half each.
"I couldn't touch them for the first couple weeks because they couldn't handle touch," Alison said.
On twin, Carter, at almost seven pounds went home a week ago, but still requires use of a heart and respiratory monitor. His brother Griffin remains in the neonatal intensive care unit at children's because he's had spells in which his heart rate drops dangerously low, but he is expected to go home sometime soon.
"It just seems unbelievable to me that we've been this fortunate that we're going to walk away with, for all (intents and) purposes, two healthy young boys when the odds were stacked against us," Tim said.
The Camps, as any parents might, hope to instill in these boys as they grow, the idea that they ought to believe in themselves.
"I call them my tiny little fighters," Alison said.
They say as they get older and experience those inevitable disappointments in life, they'll be sure and remind them of what they've been through.
"(I'll tell them), ‘you've been through a lot worse you need to not cry about this. This is nothing,' " Alison said. "So I want them to know that ‘you are a fighter and you've already overcome so... the sky is the limit.' "
