Surgeons try to separate joined sisters

SURGEONS in Salt Lake City, Utah, will try to separate two four-year-old sisters whose bodies are fused at the mid-section in an operation that could take 14 to 30 hours.

Kendra and Maliyah Herrin, who are practically face to face, share one pair of legs, a liver, one functioning kidney and part of the large intestine.

If all goes according to plan on Monday at Primary Children’s Medical Centre, each girl will get one leg and Kendra the kidney.

Maliyah will be put on dialysis until she is strong enough for a kidney transplant from her mother, Erin Herrin, ideally within three to six months.

Dr Rebecka Meyers, the hospital’s chief of paediatric surgery, said she believes this will be the first time separation surgery has been attempted on twins with a shared kidney.

The sisters were born in a perpetual hug, and have grown into outgoing girls who chatter away and finish each other’s sentences. They say they like being together all the time, but they are also full of plans for separate lives. They want to walk without using their wheeled walker, sleep in bunk beds and ride bikes.

“I want to have a princess bike,” Kendra said. “I can go fast.”

Conjoined twins occur about once in every 50,000 to 100,000 births. Only about 20% survive to become viable for separation.

“The reason for that is partly psychological, partly mechanical,” Meyers said. “If Maliyah had had a kidney, these girls would have been separated a long time ago.”

To help them understand what is about to happen to them, Kendra and Maliyah have been given a set of conjoined stuffed dolls.

Like the girls, the dolls get Band-Aids and shots. On July 20, Kendra performed separation surgery on the dolls, as Maliyah looked on.

“They gave the babies medicine and said that they were so brave,” Erin Herrin said on the family’s website.