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Brain-enmeshed Siamese twins separated
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A TEAM of Singapore surgeons early on Tuesday successfully completed the separation of a pair of Siamese twins whose brains were enmeshed, in a marathon operation which stretched more than 80 hours.
Nepalese-born twins Ganga and Jamuna Shrestha, who turned 11-months-old on Monday, are joined at the head and their brains have become enmeshed where they share the same cavity.
During the delicate surgery to separate the girls, the doctors have to determine which blood vessel and which part of each brain goes to each child. The operation began at 4pm on Friday and was expected to take up to 36 hours, but the meticulous separation and reconnection of blood vessels took considerably longer than anticipated.
Ganga and Jamuna, who turned 11 months old on Monday, were expected to leave the theatre mid-morning, more than 90 hours after the surgery began.
The doctors are donating their services, while an appeal to cover the estimated 100,000 Singapore dollars (US$56,000) cost of the delicate operation, medication and other hospital expenses raised 650,000 Singapore dollars. The surplus funds will be held in trust to cover any further treatment the girls need until they are five years old. Their impoverished parents, who come from a mountainous village of Salyan, about a one-day bus ride from the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu, could never have afforded the operation.
It is rare to have Siamese twins joined at the head. The most recent success in separating twins sharing the same skull took place in Brisbane, Australia last October. In 1997 Siamese twins similarly fused to Ganga and Jamuna were separated during a 28-hour operation in South Africa.
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