Surgery Plan To Separate The Salinas Fierros Twins
Category : Women Diary, Women Health
A huge team of doctors at a Los Angeles hospital began a procedure early this morning to separate a pair of conjoined twins attached from the chest to the pelvic areas. The operation is expected to last at least 24 hours. The complwomendiaryex surgery on Regina and Renata Salinas Fierros began at about 9 a.m. Pacific time at the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. About 80 doctors and staff members will try to separate many of the girls’ vital organs.
The Salinas Fierros twins were born facing each other and have separate heads, necks, shoulders, arms, hearts, lungs and legs. They’re fused from the midsection down, sharing part of the small intestine and the entire large intestine. They share a number of internal organs, including a liver and large intestine. They were born facing each other in what one doctor described as a “permanent hug.”
Doctors said the twin girls were doing well after more than six hours of surgery. They remained attached by a bony structure near the pelvis after more than six hours of surgery, said Dr. Henri Ford, director of surgery at the hospital.
“Everything has been going impeccably as one could possibly imagine,” Dr. Ford said, according to The Associated Press. He added that doctors remained alert for any signs of trouble.
“Even when things are going very smoothly, danger is still imminent,” he said.
Doctors told the press their first step is to divide the breastbone of the two girls. Next for the doctors is to separate the liver, genitalia, bladder, and pelvis. Once the initial separation occurs, plastic surgeons will step in to reconstruct the two girls from the midsection down.
“It’s exciting and it’s stressful, but we’re really looking forward to giving the kids a new life, a new opportunity to really be themselves and be able to function in a normal way down the road,” Stein said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Dominic Femino heads the orthopaedic surgery team, which goes to work once the twins are apart: “What we have to do is to cut the pelvic bones in the back on each side and then rotate the hips and legs forward, so they’re not pointing backward any more, rotate them into a more normal position and close the pelvic ring in the front.”
Doctors have implanted inflatable balloons under the girls’ skin to stretch it so that it would expand enough to close up the surgical wound.
Dr. Stein, an attending pediatric surgeon at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and an assistant professor of surgery at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, also led the team that successfully separated conjoined twins in 2003, the hospital said. The hospital said those twins, wards of the state known publicly as ‘Baby A’ and ‘Baby B’, were adopted, along with their triplet sister, by a “wonderful family and continue to thrive together in another state.”
Despite the complications, doctors are hopeful the surgery will be a success. He believes the surgery will “give [the twins] independent lives and hopefully a very promising future, according to The Associated Press.
Regina and Renata were born with their faces inches apart on Aug. 2, 2005 at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center to Mexican parents who came to the U.S. on a tourist visa. The twins were later transferred to Childrens Hospital where doctors spent months preparing for the separation surgery.
Last spring, when Ms. Fierros was pregnant, she was hospitalized with a urinary tract infection during a visit to Los Angeles to visit relatives and learned then that she was carrying conjoined twins.
Regina is the weaker of the twins and has trouble gaining weight despite her healthy appetite. But doctors said they have seen cases where the feeble conjoined twin improved after separation. The girls’ mother, 23-year-old Sonia, said Tuesday that she felt conflicted heading into the operation.
“We feel nervous and anxious, but at the same time very tranquil,” she said in Spanish.
She added: “It’s strange to see the girls together, and it will be even stranger to see them apart. But I think for us it’s going to be more normal to see them separated than to keep on seeing them joined.”
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