Baby with two heads bleeds to death after operation

AN infant girl born with a second head bled to death on Saturday following complex surgery in which doctors removed the partly formed twin that had threatened her brain, her parents and doctors said.

A medical team completed the operation, but said eight-week-old Rebeca Martinez died seven hours after the surgery, which doctors believed to be the first of its kind.

“We knew this was a very risky surgery, and now we accept what God has decided,” said the father, 29-year-old Franklin Martinez, who stood next to his wife at a hospital news conference, visibly exhausted and eyes swollen. “Rebeca is no longer with us physically, but no-one will forget her.”

Martinez said the family would bury Rebeca in a private funeral.

The Dominican girl lost a lot of blood during the operation, which apparently caused a heart attack, said Dr Jorge Lazareff, the lead brain surgeon.

“This was not a failure or an error,” he said. “When we left here last night at midnight the girl was in stable condition. At some point in the middle of the night, she started to bleed.”

Doctors had warned the baby would be highly susceptible to infection or haemorrhaging after the operation, which lasted about 11 hours.

“She was too little to withstand the surgery,” said her mother, 26-year-old Maria Gisela Hiciano, crying softly.

Martinez said doctors told them at about 3am that Rebeca suffered a minor heart attack due to the bleeding, but they believed they could stabilise her. Rebeca then had more heart attacks at 5am and died shortly after 6am, he said.

Fully developed twins born conjoined at the head are extremely rare, accounting for one of every 2.5 million births, but parasitic twins, where one twin stops developing in the womb, are even rarer. Rebeca was the eighth documented case in the world of craniopagus parasiticus, doctors said.

All the other infants documented with the condition died before birth, making Rebeca’s surgery the first known operation of its kind. Doctors said Rebeca had several blood transfusions, which complicated normal clotting. They also said her heart was accustomed to beating faster to pump out more blood for the second head.

“In that case, you can’t do anything. This is the worst complication that can happen in this kind of surgery,” said Dr Benjamin Rivera, one of two lead surgeons.

Friends and family donated almost four gallons of blood for surgeons to use during Rebeca’s operation.

With its own partly developed brain, ears, eyes and lips, the second head was growing faster than the lower one, said Lazareff, who in 2002 led a team that successfully separated conjoined Guatemalan twin girls. Doctors will learn more in the coming months as they review details of Rebeca’s operation, said Lazareff, who is director of paediatric neurosurgery at the University of California at Los Angeles’ Mattel Children’s Hospital.

The doctor said such surgeries still could be viable in the future.

Without an operation, doctors said Rebeca would have barely been able to lift her head at three months old. They said the pressure from the second head, attached on top of the first and facing up, would have prevented Rebeca’s brain from developing.

During the surgery, 18 surgeons, nurses and doctors worked in rotations to cut off the undeveloped tissue, clip the veins and arteries, and close the skull using a bone and skin graft from the second head.