By IANS,
New Delhi: A team of 27 doctors separated 18-month-old Siamese twins Geeta and Sita after a 14 hour-long rare and difficult surgery in a hospital Monday.
The surgery started in the morning at Batra Hospital and ended just before 9 p.m. The twins are from Bihar and their parents are labourers.
“The surgery is over and the twins have been separated,” Sanjeev Bagai, a senior doctor and chief executive of the hospital, told IANS.
The twins were born with congenital abnormalities of being joined at the waist, hip and legs and had a common genito-urinary and intestinal system, Bagai said.
Whether the surgery is successful will be known only after 24 hours, he said.
“We have not taken any help from anyone outside our hospital as we were in a position to carry out the surgery.”
Doctors carried out tests on the twins for seven days before shifting them to the theatre.
Siamese twins are extremely rare and very few reach the surgery stage. The long-term success of separation surgeries in many international centres is less than 50 percent.
“This attempt by our doctors emphasizes that Indian doctors are superior both in technology and efficiency to many of their counterparts abroad,” Bagai said.
“We will know the result of the surgery by tomorrow (Tuesday). If everything goes well, the kids will have to stay in the hospital up to four weeks,” the chief executive officer of the hospital added.