Separated At Birth, You Won’t Believe How These Orphaned Sisters Reunited

When Holly Hoyle O’Brien started work as a nurse at Doctors Hospital of Sarasota, she had found her dream job, but little did she realize the job would lead to an improbable discovery from her past.

O’Brien as a baby in South Korea was orphaned. She was adopted by an American family, educated here, and had worked for decades helping those in need as a nurse. One day, a patient told O’Brien there was another nurse from South Korea who worked there and that maybe they should talk.

“One of the patients told me there was another nurse, named Meagan, who was from Korea,” O’Brien said. “She said, ‘You should talk to her. Maybe you’re from the same town.'”

Meagan Hughes was indeed from South Korea and working the same 7 a.m.-7:30 p.m. shift at the hospital as O’Brien. The two started to became friends and it quickly became clear their backgrounds were eerily similar.

Like O’Brien, Hughes had been orphaned. Hughes was adopted by an American family, educated here, and began a career as a nurse. The women even realized they had been born with the same family name: Hughes was born Eun-Sook Shin; O’Brien, Pok-nam Shin.

“I was like, ‘This is too good to be true,'” said O’Brien. “I said, ‘We’ve got to do the DNA test; it’s the only way we’ll get the truth out of the whole thing.”

They sent DNA samples to a lab in Canada where the tests confirmed that O’Brien and Hughes were in fact long-lost sisters.

“I was trembling,” O’Brien said. “I was so excited. I was ecstatic.”

“When I heard from Holly, my first reaction was like, ‘Oh my god,'” Hughes added. “I was in shock. I was numb. I have a sister.”

After four decades and thousands of miles apart, it’s a wonder how two sisters would end up working at the same hospital, but sometimes fate just has a way of making the world seem like the tiniest of places.