08/27/2025
At 32 weeks pregnant, Emma Wilson of New Albany noticed a troubling change—she wasn’t feeling the babies move like before.
“I had just transferred to a new job and during my second week there, I had decreased fetal movements—I wasn’t feeling the babies move like I had been,” Emma said. “On my lunch break, I went to get things checked out, and they admitted me to Women’s Hospital. The next morning, the doctor came in and said, ‘it’s time to have birthdays today.’”
Emma had an emergency Cesarean-section Dec. 15, 2021, and delivered identical twin girls—Hazel, who weighed 4 pounds, and Harper, who weighed 3 pounds. Both girls had underdeveloped lungs and struggled to breathe.
The girls spent 34 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at North Mississippi Medical Center Women’s Hospital. While there, a neonatologist diagnosed them both with cutis aplasia, a rare congenital condition in which a section of skin, usually on the scalp, is missing. In their case, tissue and bone underneath the scalp were not fully developed either.
“Where their skull bones should have been, there were just soft spots,” Emma explained.
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