Conjoined twins born five months ago in Jacksonville, Florida are now separate for the first time. The twins emerged into the world with their bile ducts, livers, and intestinal tracts fused together. Parents Michelle Brantley and Bryan Mirabal says the boys chance of survival was estimated by experts at 25 percent. Video from WTLV.

A team of 20 surgeons, nurses and other specialists went into Thursday at Wolfson Children’s Hospital. Family and friends waited in a nearby conference room.

Michelle Brantley, Carter and Conner’s mother, said that “everything was going through my head,” referring to the mountains of information and cautions doctors had shared prior to commencement of the surgery. Father Bryan Mirabal paced around and in and out of the room. He reported being afraid of “the what if’s and could be’s.”

Regular updates arrived throughout the day via phone and in person. Then, at 3:34 p.m., the news arrived that the twins were, for the first time, officially separate.

Through tears, grandmother Cathy Mirabal, said that “a load has been lifted off so much.”

The twins are now in intensive care. Their abdominal walls could not be closed because neither had enough skin to do make this happen. So they will each – separately – have at least one more surgery.

The group of family and friends cheered in a hallway as the medical team exited the operating room. Aunt Jasmine Mirabal said that, the family was so used to seeing the boys truly joined together that “Seeing them separate just doesn’t seem right. Seeing them separate,” she said, “just seems so crazy.”

Conjoined twins – sometimes known as Siamese twins – are rare, occurring in anywhere from 1 in 49,000 to 1 in 189,000 births.