By Muizat Hameed
A 78 member medical team has successfully separated twin sisters that were conjoined at the chest and abdomen.
The surgery which took place at the National Hospital in Abuja occurred around November 2019, details of which were kept hidden in order to ensure no post-surgery complications arose.
The sisters, Mercy and Goodness have now been certified fit and stable enough to go home after six weeks of performing the surgery.
Spokesman to the National Hospital, Abuja, Dr Tayo Haastrup said the surgery which took about 13 hours to be completed was the first to be successfully performed at the government run specialist centre.
Dr Haastrup said, “We are just happy and proud that the team that worked on this surgery were all Nigerians. It was done in Nigeria and the parents didn’t have to og outside the country.”
He added that the surgery which would have cost thousands of dollars was done free of charge for the parents whose income was very low and wouldn’t have allowed them the affordability to go ahead with the surgery.
The twins who were born on August 13, 2019 would have been operated immediately if they had not come up with a condition known as omphalocele, a birth defect that left a section of the twin’s intestines sticking outside their navel.
In his words, pediatric surgeon, Emmanuel Ameh said, “Separating conjoined twins is a complicated and dangerous procedure, and not all twins, because of their shared organs can be separated.”
He said the girls underwent surgery to repair the area that had been torn open at the navel and doctors had to wait for many weeks for them to recover from the procedure.
He further explained that plastic surgeons in the team were worried that the girls will be at risk of infection because of the large section of their chest that would be open after being separated thus a large artificial skin had to be created before they could proceed with the operation.
He said, “We needed to determine if they could live independently when they are separated. We found out that they were sharing a diaphragm and one liver, but all organs were separate.”
“We also had to get some medical equipment that were not available,” he concluded.
