Conjoined twins to be born

FORT WAYNE -- April McCray faces an uncertain future after finishing her senior year at Snider High School. It's not the ailing job market or questions about further education or training.\nEighteen-year-old April is 7 1/2 months pregnant with conjoined twins.\nShe and her husband, Rocky McCray, 19, have known since August that their twin girls are conjoined, a rare condition in which babies' bodies fuse together.\nWhen they first learned the twins were conjoined, they were told there were two options. "The first option was that April could terminate," said April's mother Marsha Boyanowski. "And April immediately said, 'That's not an option.'"\nOr the babies could come out stillborn, April said.\nStill, there was no doubt. Abortion was out of the question.\nSince, they've learned a great deal from doctors and from their own research. Conjoined twins come from a single fertilized egg that starts to split into identical twins shortly after conception, but then stops before the split is complete.\nThe Indiana Department of Public Health doesn't break down overall multiple birth statistics to show the number of conjoined twins, but 2002 provisional data shows fewer than five sets diagnosed as conjoined.\nThrough ultrasound diagnostics, April and Rocky have learned that their twins are joined at the side of the torso and have two heads. A fetal heart specialist at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis told them there appears to be two hearts.\nThough conjoined twins usually are called Baby A and Baby B in medical circles, April and Rocky named their girls as soon as they learned they were conjoined. "This way, we can pray for them by name," Marsha said.\nThe girls are Stephanie Nicole on the left and Rebecca Marie on the right. Rocky has their names tattooed on his arms.\nApril's father, John Boyanowski, pastor at Pleasant Lake United Methodist Church, said when they first learned the twins were conjoined, they told people at Taylor University, Fort Wayne, where both John and Marsha are students.\nAs a pastor and a person whose first instinct is to help others, John said his initial challenge was coping with not being able to fix things.\n"Here's my baby, and there's absolutely nothing I can do. I can't kiss it and make it better like a boo-boo, and I can't explain to her all these things because I don't know what to expect."\nMarsha, who's majoring in counseling and missions at Taylor, said there were a lot of tears in the beginning, but the pragmatist in her took over as she saw the need to learn as much as possible.\nWhen a friend asked him what they would do if the babies die, Rocky had an honest answer.\n"I don't even know the way I'll be, but it will always go back to God had a plan. And if they die, that was part of it and some sort of good's going to come out of it," he said.\nUnderlying all the worries about the babies is the financial concern. Though April has insurance through Hoosier Healthwise, Marsha said they are not sure how much it will cover.\nIf they are able to bring their babies home, April and Rocky will continue to live with her parents. With John and Marsha both taking classes and John working two jobs -- he also works at Youth Services Center -- life is already more than full.\nYet they remain fully supportive of April and Rocky and the decision they've made to bring their babies into the world and to share their story with others.\nApril wants people to know about their conjoined twins because she hopes to reach other teenage girls.