One-year old Maria de Jesus Quiej Alvarez watches as the UCLA medical anesthesiology team prepares her and twin sister Maria Teresa Quiej Alvarez August 6, 2002 for their successful separation as conjoined twins. The medical team took 22 hours to separate the girls who are from Guatemala.
PHOTO – REUTERS
LOS ANGELES – Twin Guatemalan girls, who spent the first year of life joined at the head, have yet to open their eyes after marathon separation surgery but were expected to make a full recovery, doctors said. Twins Maria Teresa and Maria de Jesus Quiej-Alvarez were still under heavy sedation and on ventilators after their grueling 22-hour surgery ended on Tuesday at Mattel Children‘s Hospital at the University of California at Los Angeles. Sedatives, used to keep the lively pair still, meant the girls still had their eyes closed but doctors said they had appeared fighting fit immediately after the surgery.
„Both of them moved their hands, feet, everything. Both of them were strong enough to cough and that is why we had to use the paralytic agents so they don‘t fight the ventilator and so they have a good 24 to 48 hours to let the brain relax after the surgery,“ intensive care specialist Andy Madikians told a news conference.
The girls were born in a rural area of Guatemala‘s south coast with the tops of their heads fused and their faces tilted in opposite directions. Parents Leticia Alba and Wenceslao Quiej-Alvarez are from Belen, one of thousands of dirt-poor coastal hamlets where people eke out a living in the banana, sugar and coffee industries.
In Guatemala, half an hour‘s drive from the nearest paved road, residents of tiny Belen on Wednesday prepared to welcome about 100 well-wishers who were headed to the hamlet for a prayer meeting dedicated to the girls. In a one-room concrete house surrounded by fields, their grandparents prayed before a makeshift altar displaying photographs of the twins amid candles.
Madikians said it was too early to assess whether the girls had sustained any brain damage during the operation carried out by a 50-strong UCLA medical team working in shifts. Maria Teresa was rushed back for a further five hours of surgery on Tuesday after suffering a blood clot on the surface of the brain. Madikians said she was now doing well and that „things are moving in the right direction.“
The major complication of the separation surgery centered on the fact that the girls shared some of the veins that drain blood from the brain. Lead neurosurgeon Dr Jorge Lazareff said he was „optimistic about the chances for a full recovery for both Maria Teresa and Maria de Jesus, and their ability to live full and normal lives.“ The girls are affectionately known as „Las Maritas,“ or „Little Marias“ and Guatemalans are following their progress in blanket media coverage.
Conjoined twins occur once in every 200,000 live births, but twins who are fused at the tops of their heads, known as craniopagus twins, make up only about 2 percent of those. They usually die early because organs like the heart and kidneys of one twin are doing most of the work and once they start to fail both twins will die. The nonprofit group Healing the Children arranged for the twins to be treated at UCLA, which puts the cost of their care at $1.5 million, not including the services of the doctors, nurses and other professionals who donated their time. Reuters
