In January of 2017, Zainab Bibi gave birth to twin girls by C-section. They were craniopagus twins, joined at the head. When the twins Safa and Marwa were 19 months old, they traveled to the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London for separation surgery. It was a complicated case.
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Their skull is like a stove pipe, a long straight tube. Scans show that the girls have two distinct brains but these are misshapen. The right hemisphere of each brain is sticking up 90 degrees, projecting into the other twin’s brain cavity.
This distorted shape will need correcting if the girls are to have near normal-shaped heads.
The surgical team’s biggest concern is how to separate the complex shared network of veins and arteries. Each twin supplies the other with blood. Severing these connections carries a risk of starving the brain of nourishment and causing a stroke.
Last year, the separation was accomplished in three operations: the first (15 hours long) to separate the brains and arteries, and the second (20 hours) to separate the veins. In February of 2019, the final operation detached the twins from each other. But their brains still needed to be reshaped, and their skulls crafted to cover them, which brought the surgery to 17 hours. Read the fascinating story of how Safe and Marwa were separated at BBC. -via Damn Interesting
Source: neatorama