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Despite suffering from a severe muscle disease, Jesy Nelson remains hopeful for her 8-month-old twin daughters.
Weeks after revealing that her girls Ocean Jade and Story Monroe had been diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type 1, she said she believed her daughters would make it to age 2 “against all odds.”
On Wednesday, February 4’s episode of Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast, the 34-year-old Little Mix singer detailed her daughters’ condition.
“So spinal muscular atrophy is a disease that weakens the muscles, and what it causes is that they don’t have the genes that we all have in their bodies, so their muscles deteriorate and become weaker,” she said.
Jesy Nelson/Instagram
Nelson and her ex-fiancé, musician Zion Foster, prematurely welcomed twins on May 15, 2025, just weeks after the new mother underwent emergency surgery. She shared the news of their diagnosis last month.
“And if they don’t get treatment in time, they end up with all their muscles dying, which affects their breathing, swallowing, everything, and they die before they’re two years old,” she continued on Wednesday’s podcast.
When Ms Lehning expressed sympathy, the mother-of-two replied: “We have no choice but to accept it. We’re just trying to make the best of the situation.”
She added that her daughters are “the strongest, most resilient babies.”
“I truly believe they will defy all odds, because they already have. It’s frustrating. They were in my womb. They had TTTS (twin transfusion syndrome),” Nelson said.
According to John Hopkins Medicine, this rare and serious syndrome affects multiple fetuses that “share a single placenta (afterbirth) and a network of blood vessels that provide essential oxygen and nutrients for development in the womb.”
This condition creates a nutrient imbalance before birth.
“I look at everything through a completely different lens, because I think they had SMA, but they also had SMA, and then they just kept fighting it all,” Nelson said of the twins.
The British pop star said in a conversation that her twins were born prematurely at 31 weeks due to TTTS, and that she learned of her spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type 1 diagnosis while in the hospital’s neonatal unit.
Karwai Tan/WireImage
A full-term pregnancy is approximately 39 to 40 weeks.
In an emotional video shared to her Instagram account on January 4, Nelson revealed her daughters’ muscle problems after “the toughest three or four months and endless commitments.”
“We were told that they would probably never walk, they would probably never get their neck strength back and they would be disabled. So the best thing we can do now is get them treated and hope for the best,” she said.
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Nelson called the past three months “the most heartbreaking time of my life,” adding that she felt like she was “grieving the life I was meant to spend with my children.”
Before finishing her talk, Ms Nelson said she was grateful that her babies were still with her and urged other parents to take their children to hospital immediately if they had symptoms, as it was a “crucial time” when it came to saving lives.
