It must have been such a great news for Jesse and Amy Carlsen, parents of conjoined twin daughters, Abbigail and Isabelle, to find out that the nearly 7 hours surgery to separate them went very well.
According to doctors handling the surgery, the process was complicated but there was a 90-95 percent chance that these twin sisters survived. The team taking part in the operation consisted of about 30 people, applauding when finally the livers were seperated.
These great baby girls are now doing just fine.
But how actually this could happened to them?
Conjoined twins happens where thezygote of identical twins fails to completely separate. They occur in an estimated one in 200,000 births. [wikipedia]
Are all separation surgery successful like these girls?
The younger the twins get the surgery, the bigger the survival rates. Especially now with more accurate imaging studies and better anesthetic and operative techniques.
However, the operation is more difficult in adults than in children whose brains are better able to recover from the surgery. This was what happened to 29-year-old law graduates, Laleh and Ladan Bijani, the conjoined twins from Iran. The world was sharing grief for the loss of these courageous and brave ladies.
