Two Russian mothers have been reunited with their rightful children after the babies were accidentally swapped in a hospital error.
Lyudmila Trofimova and Lyudmila Dubaeva each gave birth to a daughter at the same hospital, both by caesarian section and only one minute apart.
When they were given their children after the birth, Trofimova says she immediately noticed that the child was not her own.
“I knew immediately that something was wrong because the baby I was given did not look like us. I asked to see Lyudmila Dubaeva's baby. They showed me and I saw at once that she was a copy of my elder son.”
However, hospital staff refused to acknowledge they had made a mistake, insisting that each woman had been given the correct baby.
Trofimova and Dubaeva kept in touch over the subsequent three months, swapping photos of their growing daughters.
Eventually, convinced of the hospitals error, they paid for DNA tests and proved that the daughter they had each taken home actually belonged to the other.
But even then, the process of getting the right daughter back was fraught with tension.
Dubaeva's husband feared she'd cheated on him, and their arguments almost led to a divorce, while the hospital continued to refuse to accept the truth.
It was only when Trofimova got the police involved that the hospital admitted it had made a mistake and fired the staff responsible for the mix-up.
The women returned to the hospital to exchange their children and are now spending days together to help each other get used to their real baby.
It is a difficult process, says Trofimova.
“Of course I understand that Anna is really her daughter, not mine. I do understand that Anna will be in good hands," she says.
"But Anna will always be like my daughter too. It's hard. It's very hard, almost like a heartbreak.”
Both mothers say they have been deeply traumatised and are struggling with being separated from the child they nursed for three months.
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