Cautious success for separated twins operation

Conjoined twins separated during marathon surgery have spent their first night in separate beds.

The girls, born joined at their heads, were in a serious but stable condition in hospital in Australia.

Trishna and Krishna, who will be three next month, shared a section of skull, blood vessels and brain tissue. They were separated yesterday after 25 hours of delicate surgery and reconstruction by a team of 16 surgeons and nurses.

“It was amazing to see,” said Leo Donnan, chief of surgery at Royal Children’s Hospital. “The girls look very different.”

He said the girls are in serious but stable condition in the intensive care unit.

It is too early to know whether the girls suffered any brain damage during the marathon operation – an outcome doctors said was a 50-50 chance. They will remain in an induced coma for monitoring for several days.

Andrew Greensmith, a plastic surgeon from New Zealand, called the surgery painstaking and remarkable.

Dr Greensmith was holding the girls’ heads at the final moment of separation, when the beds were pushed apart millimetre by millimetre.

“It was quite bizarre to see them apart for a change ... quite surreal,” he said.

He said the surgery went smoothly.

“We were prepared for potentially catastrophic things happening at some point, major bleeding which we may have trouble stopping, all sorts of possibilities. But we had none of that at all,” he said.

Before the surgery, doctors had said there was a 50% chance the girls could suffer brain damage and a 25% chance one of the sisters would die.

Trishna and Krishna were found in an orphanage in Bangladesh in 2007 by a representative from the Children First Foundation, who took them to Australia.