A pair of conjoined twins have taken to TikTok to answer some questions they frequently receive from curious members of the public.
Carmen and Lupita Andrade, 23, share organs below the waist.
They live in the same body and share a bloodstream, so if one gets drunk, they both do, MailOnline reported.
But “we’re still two different people,” Carmen said, and they have separate IDs and social security numbers to prove it.
Originally from Mexico before moving to Connecticut, United States of America, the twins defied doctors’ predictions they would only live a few days when they were born.
Now they’re old enough to confront some of the myths and curiosities about life as conjoined twins.
In a TikTok video viewed more than 9.8 million times, Carmen and Lupita revealed some of the truths they live with.
“One of us can be awake and one of us can be asleep,” Carmen said.
“If one of us is tired, we both don’t have to both be tired because we have two separate brains.”
She added: “It’s funny because I stay up later than Lupita, but when [my boyfriend] sleeps over, I fall asleep quickly, and he stays up talking with her.”
They also can’t control each other’s limbs, even if Carmen is in the driving seat of a car.
But that doesn’t mean their experiences are totally separate.
If one of them dies, the other will soon follow.
Carmen said: “We share a bloodstream, so eventually sepsis will kick in and obviously within hours or days the other one will die.
“But we’re not dead, so why always ask us that?”
Some strangers were keen to know how they have sex if they share a reproductive system.
They both have endometriosis and pelvic pain, but Carmen left it up to their viewers to “do the math of your weird inappropriate questions.”
But she did reveal she and Lupita are unable to have kids. Carmen added that she and her partner don’t want kids anyway.
She has been dating her boyfriend Daniel for three years since meeting, and she’s absolutely clear he’s just dating her, not her sister, who is asexual.
Carmen instantly knew he was different from all the men who fetishise conjoined twins.
She told Today: “I never tried to hide the fact that I’m a conjoined twin, which meant I got a lot of messages from guys with fetishes.
“He didn’t lead with a question about my condition.
“I have social anxiety, and I’ve ended up cancelling dates at the last minute, but I felt calm on the way there.”
Fellow conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel have faced a similar dilemma.
Abby married Josh Bowling in 2021, but news of their wedding only broke last month.
Strangely enough, Brittany was not on the witness list but the other sister Morgan was, and Abby changed her last name, meaning there are two surnames in the same body.
While some conjoined twins can be surgically separated, this is too risky for Carmen and Lupita given the amount of internal structures they share.
That might be alarming if they got sick of each others’ company, but it seems they’re getting along grand.
“Sometimes at the end of the day, we’re just exhausted and we don’t want to talk,” Carmen said.
“That’s when we’ll go on different devices and do our own thing.
“I have my laptop to do schoolwork, and Lupita will put on headphones and listen to music or go on her phone.
“We’ve been conjoined our whole life, so it’s not like we miss our independence. It’s all we’ve ever known, right?”
