TWO-YEAR-OLD Egyptian twins joined at the head have been successfully separated by US doctors.
Ahmed and Mohamed Ibrahim now face a long recovery after the marathon surgery that lasted 26 hours and took more than a year of planning.
News of yesterday’s successful separation of the twins 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 Doctor 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 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 worked to cover 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 paid to bring the boys to Dallas when they were one-year-olds, 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.
Egyptian and Middle East media have been closely following progress of the operation - the first such procedure since the death of twin Iranian women during surgery in July.
The boys were born on June 2, 2001, by Caesarean section to Sabah Abu el-Wafa and her husband, Ibrahim Mohammed Ibrahim.
Conjoined at the crown of the head since birth, the boys had trouble closing their eyes, moving their necks and swallowing.
They could not stand on their own because of the way they were joined, and would have faced certain and progressive loss of functions had they remained as they were.
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.
It is the first operation to separate twins conjoined at the head since the deaths of Laleh and Ladan Bijani in July. The 29-year-old Iranian women died within 90 minutes of each other from massive blood loss during the separation surgery in Singapore.
However, doctors hope that Ahmed and Mohamed's young bones and tissue will be able to cope with the strain of the operation and recovery.
