Conjoined twins opened up on what their life was like after becoming teachers
Published
| Last updated
Featured Image Credit: OMG Stories / YouTube
Abby and Brittany Hensel are conjoined twins who work as teachers at an elementary school.
Having been connected all their life, the 32-year-olds have spent the past decade working as teachers after they graduated university and entered the world of work.
Loading…
Abby and Brittany are conjoined twins, to give it the proper medical name, dicephalic parapagus twins, which gives them the appearance of having two heads and one body.
It's a very rare condition and only a few people with it survive until adulthood, and it is considered better not to try and separate the twins.
Each woman has her own heart, stomach, spine and lungs, and they each control one leg and one arm each of the conjoined body.
The twin sisters can eat, write and complete other tasks separately, though other tasks which require the use of multiple limbs at the same time requires some very precise coordination between the pair.
Working together, the sisters can drive a car, play the piano, ride a bike and participate in sports, and they also work together in their jobs as teachers.
Each of them has their own driver's license and had to pass their test separately, as the state of Minnesota requires both of them to hold their own license.
The sisters have appeared on TV several times, first in 1996 on The Oprah Winfrey Show and then on documentaries Joined for Life and Joined at Birth.
Abby and Brittany also featured on UK TV show Extraordinary People, and starred in their own TLC reality show Abby & Brittany, which aired in 2012 and followed the sisters as they graduated from university and started working as teachers.
While they once starred in reality TV, these days the sisters live a relatively low-key life as elementary school teachers.
Together, they teach fourth and fifth grade kids with a focus on math in a role they've held since 2013.
Although they earned separate degrees and each hold a teaching license, when they secured the job as teachers Abby and Brittany were only paid one salary split between them, which they understood as they were 'doing the job of one person'.
Abby told the BBC in 2013: "As maybe experience comes in we'd like to negotiate a little bit, considering we have two degrees and because we are able to give two different perspectives or teach in two different ways."
"One can be teaching and one can be monitoring and answering questions," Brittany said. "So in that sense we can do more than one person."
They may be conjoined but each sister has her own 'different style', though it's something which requires compromise and they see themselves as 'totally different people'.
