Egyptian twins successfully separated

Two-year-old Egyptian twins joined at the top of their heads were successfully separated by doctors in the US, but face a long recovery after a marathon surgery lasting 26 hours.

News of yesterday’s successful separation of Ahmed and Mohamed Ibrahim overjoyed their parents, surgeons and carers.

“At one point when someone came up and said you have two boys, the father jumped to my neck and he hugged me and he fainted and I cared for him. He told me that he never dreamt of such a moment,” said Dr Nasser Abdel Al, who was one of the twins’ doctors in Egypt and with the family in Dallas.

“The mother on the other hand was crying like everybody else. She was there thanking everybody around and thanking her faith that brought her to this great place – Dallas, Texas.”

As surgeons worked to finish closing the boys’ head wounds, part of the medical team at Children’s Medical Centre Dallas talked yesterday about the successful completion of the surgery.

Ahmed and Mohamed, who had an intricate connection of blood vessels but separate brains, were physically separated about 26 hours after they entered the operating room.

Doctors then went to work covering the head wounds. The entire surgery took 34 hours.

The twins were listed in critical but stable condition, and doctors said the surgery went according to plan. Concerns now include risk of infection and how the wounds will heal.

Dr Kenneth Salyer, a craniofacial surgeon who founded the World Craniofacial Foundation that brought the boys to Dallas, said his feelings had ranged “from moments of ecstasy to moments of anxiety”.

Dr Dale Swift, a paediatric neurosurgeon, said it was too early to tell if the boys would have neurological damage.

He said the boys’ post-surgical care will be vital to their recovery.

After leaving the operating room, the boys will be taken to an intensive care unit, where they will remain in a drug-induced coma for three to five days.

Both boys will need additional reconstructive surgery in coming years.

The boys were born June 2, 2001, by Caesarean section to Sabah Abu el-Wafa and her husband, Ibrahim Mohammed Ibrahim.

Both parents, from el-Homr, some 400 miles south of Cairo, were in Dallas for the surgery.

A team of specialists determined in June 2002 that the boys could be separated, though the risks included possible brain damage and death.

The boys’ father told doctors he felt it was worth it to give them a chance at a normal life.