Australian conjoined twins successfully separated

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 6:05p.m.

Bangladeshi conjoined twins Krishna and Trishna have been separated in a procedure which took two years to plan and a marathon 27 hours to complete.

On Monday morning at 8:30am, the complex and risky surgery of separating the girls began in Australia.

Surgeons thought it would take 16 hours. But 24 hours later a surgeon finally emerged to say they were still working. The twins still had not been separated.

For the next three hours surgeons performed perhaps the most fiddly and life-threatening work. They had to sever a small section of brain and several blood vessels shared by the girls.

Just after lunch another of the team emerged with the world everyone had been hoping to hear.

“We would like to announce there has been successful separation of the twins,” said Head of surgery Leo Donnan.

“At 11am the team managed to separate the brains, and they are both very well.”

But it is not over yet. The reconstruction surgery has now begun.

“I just want to know, all I want to know is that they are okay,” says Australian missionary Moira Kelly.

Ms Kelly saved the twins from a Bangladesh orphanage – their death bed – two years ago, and brought them to Australia.

“I’m very, very normal, and very ordinary,” she says. “I’m hardly a saint. Definitely not a saint.”

She knows the risky operation wass their only chance of survival. She was even there to give them a kiss before they went in.

‘There is no going back now. You can only go forward. But don’t you think, when you look at Krishna and Trishna, they deserve individual lives. I just don’t like to think of death and separation,” she says.

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