What you need to know
Jesy Nelson is opening up about her twin daughters’ unusual medical checkup and spending quality time with them.
On Saturday, January 10, the Little Mix alum, 34, shared footage of herself playing with one of her baby girls on her Instagram Stories. She has eight-month-old twin daughters Ocean Jade and Story Monroe with her fiancé Zion Foster.
In the video, Nelson is seen sitting on the floor with one of her twin daughters sitting across from her in a baby chair. She playfully rubbed her nose against the baby girl’s face, and the toddler responded with a high-pitched laugh.
“I love her little laugh so much🥺,” Nelson wrote over the video.
The clip was released after Nelson recently announced that her twin daughters had been diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type 1.
Jesy Nelson/Instagram
According to the Cleveland Clinic, SMA is an inherited neuromuscular disease that “causes worsening muscle weakness.” SMA type 1 is diagnosed in 60% of cases and symptoms appear within the first 6 months of life.
Nelson revealed in a video posted to Instagram on Sunday, January 4, that her twin daughters were diagnosed with SMA type 1.
The Little Mix alum, who welcomed her daughters with Foster, 27, on May 15, 2025, said the condition was “the most severe muscle disease a baby can suffer from”. She said doctors told her her daughters would “probably never be able to walk” and would become “disabled” as a result.
“In the two weeks since I was diagnosed…I had to put my children on ventilators and do a lot of things that mothers should never do to their children,” she explained in the video.
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Jesy Nelson/Instagram
On Wednesday, January 7, Nelson gave her first interview since revealing her daughters’ diagnosis on British talk show This Morning.
She said she feels “overwhelmed” by the support she has received since sharing her twin’s situation, and that the diagnosis has “completely changed my life” as twins require 24-hour care and regular hospital visits.
She said the twins “need a cough machine to help them cough and have to have feeding tubes inserted into their noses to drain secretions from their chests.”
During the talk show, she revealed that her daughter Story “is not strong enough to breathe on her own at night, so she has to wear a ventilator at night.”
“I had to learn this within days of being diagnosed. Just like the horrible thing that just happened, there’s so much to deal with as you all try to deal with this,” Nelson said.
Nelson explained that she created the video about the twins’ diagnosis to raise awareness about SMA and encourage parents that catching it early can potentially save their children’s lives.
