A pair of conjoined Florida twins appears to be recovering from a separation survey performed Friday at Wolfson Children's Hospital and Baptist Medical Centers in Jacksonville.
Carter and Conner Mirabal, born on Dec. 12, are connected at the chest and abdomen - they have two separate livers but most of their organs are fused together and they share a bile duct, reported CBS News.
Friday's surgery to separate the twins' lower intestines was the first of several surgeries the boys will undergo to separate their bodies from one another.
"We do believe in time that they will successfully be able to be separated," Dr. Daniel Robie, a pediatric surgeon at Wolfson, told reporters Monday.
Carter and Conner's parents called the twins their "Christmas miracle" on Facebook.
The doctors are planning on keeping the twins at the hospital for the six months between Friday's surgery and their next one, reported CBS News. They are waiting about six months to do the surgery because the doctors want the boys to grow as much as possible prior to the operation.
Conjoined twins occur in about one in every 200,000 pregnancies - when a fertilized egg splits into two fetuses but doesn't fully separate, reported CBS News. These rare pregnancies are usually fatal for the babies, as they only have a 35 percent survival rate past their first day in the world.
Carter and Conner, who are conjoined at the abdomen, are known as omphalopagus twins in the medical world. This type of conjoined twin has the highest survival rate.
