My twin sister and I have always been close. We are 20 years old. I am four minutes older than her. When my mother was pregnant, the doctors did not know that she was having twins. She was huge, but when they ran the tests my sister was sharing my mother's heartbeat and they didn't even know she was there.

Surprise, surprise when I was born and the doctor saw another leg. Ever since then we have been extremely close. For a long time we could not even sleep if we were not together. Although we had two cribs, we would only sleep if we were sleeping together.

We also shared a full-size bed until we were about 13 years old. We have gone through everything together and have had many instances of 'twin connections.'

We have had the same nightmares and dreams, completed each other's sentences, and known when something was wrong with each other.

The most eerie situation happened in June 2006. I had surgery on my ankle the day before our 20th birthday. My surgery was scheduled for the morning and my sister had to work in the afternoon. I told her she did not have to go to the hospital with me, that I would be fine. She told me she would see me when she got home from work that night.

I left for the hospital where they gave me a valium to calm me down (I am a big baby) enough that they could put an IV in. The put me on a bed and administered the IV in my left hand. Around that time my twin was out shopping for my 'Get Well' stuff with my younger sister and kept complaining that her left hand was killing her, and even had our younger sister look at it for a bruise, but there was none.

Later on, before she went to work, she met my parents and a few of our friends at a diner near the hospital for brunch while I was in surgery. Right before they took me into the operating room they asked me to sign a release to have a nerve block put in. I agreed and signed it. The nerve block numbs your entire leg so that you have no pain for about 20 hours after surgery.

No one knew that I was going to get the nerve block. At lunch, my sister turned to a close friend of the family and complained that she could not feel her leg at all. Both of these things could be easily explained if she were at the hospital or with me up until the point that I went in the operating room, but she wasn't.

She had no idea which hand the IV was in and she had never even heard of a nerve block before I told her about it when I woke up.

There are plenty of instances, like this one, in our lives. So much so that we freak out most people when we start to tell them. Some friends of our family, who are parents of toddler twins, often ask us to explain things that their babies are doing - and we can.

I love being a twin, although sometimes it is very trying. We are so close that we often get under each others skin, but the next day we are back to doing just about everything together.

Brittani Evans

East Newark, New Jersey