Iranian sisters Iranian Laleh and Laden Bijani died today, more than 48 hours into marathon surgery to separate the 29-year-olds who had been born joined at the head.
|
|
The Iranian sisters Iranian Laleh and Laden Bijani
|
"Everyone upstairs is crying," said a nurse, who was directly involved in the operation in a Singapore hospital.
First to die was Laden. Hospital officials said she had lost a lot of blood as latest stage of the surgery was coming to a close.
Then, a few hours later, an official announced: "The second one has died. We treated them like family because they had been here for seven months."
Surgeons began the operation on Sunday afternoon - warning that the operation could kill one or both.
It was the first time surgeons had attempted to separate adult craniopagus twins - siblings born joined at the head - since the operation was first performed on infants in 1952.
Earlier, surgeons finished separating the twins but the women were left in a critical condition by the dangerous procedure, a hospital spokesman said.
"We should pray very hard for them," Dr Prem Kumar said.
The surgery had been expected to last at least another 24 hours as a team of plastic surgeons grafted tissue taken from the thighs of Ladan and Laleh Bijani over their brains to protect them, Kumar said.
The team of doctors had to contend with unstable pressure levels inside the twins' brains just before uncoupling them and cutting through the last bit of skull joining them, Kumar said.
Surgeons at the Raffles Hospital has separated the brains "millimetre by millimetre" Kumar said.
Yesterday, five neurosurgeons completed one of the most dangerous steps in the surgery by re-routing a shared vein and successfully attaching a vein graft from Ladan Bijani's thigh.
The shared vein, thick as a finger, drained blood from the twins' brains to their hearts. Their bodies are otherwise distinct.
Re-routing the shared vein was considered one of the biggest obstacles in the surgery. German doctors told the twins in 1996 that the surgery was too dangerous, but the Singapore team benefited from technological advances.
The operation was complicated further when the team discovered that the pressure in the twins' brains and circulatory system was fluctuating.