Some good news out of the Bay Area... This week at Stanford University's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, surgeons successfully separated two-year-old cojoined twin girls: Conjoined twins separated in 10-hour operation.After a long and complicated operation involving about twenty physicians and 15-20 operating room staff, Angelina and Angelica Sabuco, who were joined at the chest and abdomen, are expected to recover fully:
The surgery began at 6:30 a.m., and the twins were separated shortly after noon. The remaining hours of the surgery involved reconstructing the girls' chest walls, abdominal muscles and skin where they had been connected.Great to hear everything went smoothly, and we're now looking at a happy, healthy future for these two girls. Science is awesome, isn't it? More here: Conjoined twins successfully separated at Stanford.
The girls had what is called a "thoraco-omphalopagus" connection. Their livers, diaphragms, breast bones, chest and abdominal muscles were fused, but they had separate hearts, kidneys, stomachs and intestines.
Hartman had said he considered severing the liver to be the riskiest part of the procedure because of the possibility of severe blood loss, but that went smoothly. "We were able to close the abdominal muscles without a graft, and the chest closure also went better than we anticipated," Hartman said.