Three little boys came into the world on Tuesday at Rockford Memorial Hospital—with all the odds against them. The triplets, now in the hospital’s Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, are identical. That’s rare—since identical triplets occur only once in 200 million births. But the birth of this trio is even more unusual because of a very rare abnormality that existed in the mother’s placenta.
In December, Kalie and Joshua Kuhl of Machesney Park found out they were expecting triplets. Weeks later, they found out that the babies had a rare condition called Twin-to-Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome. As a result of this syndrome, all three babies were sharing blood vessels that needed to be disconnected. It’s so rare, that the odds of it happening in triplets are 1 in 1.3 billion.