Baby born with two heads..........
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| Fri, 02-06-2004 - 11:58am |
readied for surgery.
Hope the surgery is successful. I can't imagine the emotionals of this mother giving birth to a baby with this problem.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/02/06/dominican.two.heads.ap/index.html
A team of surgeons made final preparations to operate on a Dominican infant born with a second head, a risky surgery that doctors say they believe to be the first of its kind.
Led by a Los Angles-based neurosurgeon, the medical team planned to spend about 13 hours Friday removing Rebeca Martinez's second head, which has a partially formed brain, ears, eyes and lips.
Eighteen doctors and nurses working in shifts were to cut off the undeveloped tissue, clip the veins and arteries and close the skull of the 7-week-old girl using a bone graft from another part of her body.
"The head on top is growing faster than the lower one," said Dr. Jorge Lazareff, director of pediatric neurosurgery at the University of California at Los Angeles' Mattel Children's Hospital. "If we don't operate, the child would barely be able to lift her head at 3 months old."
Lazareff said the pressure from the second head, attached on top of the first and facing up, would prevent Rebeca's brain from developing.
CURE International, a Lemoyne, Pennsylvania-based charity that gives medical care to disabled children in developing countries, is paying for the surgery, estimated at $100,000. The agency funds the Center for Orthopedic Specialties in Santo Domingo, where the surgery was to be performed.
The operation is risky because the two heads share arteries.
"When the doctors come out and tell us it's all OK we'll be filled with happiness," father Franklin Martinez, 29, told The Associated Press Thursday.
Lazareff was to lead the operation along with Dr. Benjamin Rivera, a neurosurgeon at the Medical Center of Santo Domingo and the Center for Orthopedic Specialties. Lazareff led a team that successfully separated conjoined Guatemalan twin girls in 2002.
Doctors say if the surgery goes well, Rebeca won't need physical therapy and will develop as a normal child.
Twins are born conjoined at the head when an embryo splits to make identical twins and then stops growing, leaving them fused. Such twins are rare, accounting for one of every 2.5 million births.
Parasitic twins like Rebeca are even more rare. They occur when one stops developing, leaving a smaller, partially formed twin dependent on the other.
Rebeca is the eighth documented case in the world of craniopagus parasiticus, said Dr. Santiago Hazim, medical director at the Center for Orthopedic Specialties.
All the other documented infants died before birth, making it the first known surgery of its particular kind, according to Lazareff and the other doctors.
Martinez and his 26-year-old wife, Maria Gisela Hiciano, say doctors told them Rebeca would be born with a tumor on her head but none of the prenatal tests showed a second head developing.
Although the second head is only partially developed, its mouth moves when Rebeca is being breast-fed.
Martinez works at a tailor's shop. Hiciano is a supermarket cashier. Together they make about $200 a month. They have two other children, ages 4 and 1.


Renee
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040207/D80IG76G0.html
Renee
Years ago a baby born with sort of
I've been following the remarkable progress of the Egyptian boys who were cojoined at the cranium. Every step of the way, they've perfromed so much better than I expected, and it seems to me that the situation was basically the same except that the second twin had not developed a body.
Renee
This week Oprah was interviewing one of the surgeons that operated on the Egyptian twins. The surgeon said right now the twins have very little skull & they're in the process of growing their own skulls inside their heads.
>"Dr. Salyer expects they will need at least two more operations to help their bodies regenerate new skull bone to cover their brains."<
Text at Botton of Picture 2.
http://www.oprah.com/tows/slide/200402/20040204/tows_slide_20040204_01.jhtml
Their story.......
http://www.egyptiantwins.com/
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Below are quotes from article in post one. If it were not for the surgery she would have died anyway & probably
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spe/2003/twins/
We've been following the twins closely in Dallas.
'There go the wonder boys'
This afternoon, occupational therapist Heather Balusek comes into the room and finds Mohamed holding the carrot. She puts it in his right hand and encourages him to use that arm.
"Take a bite," she says. From his wagon, Ahmed says, "Bite?"
Again and again, Ms. Balusek holds Mohamed's left hand down, encouraging him to use the other hand: "Put it in your mouth."
All of these little tasks – holding food, wielding a pencil – are geared to help the boys with the skills they'll need for daily life, she says. Skills like brushing their teeth, fastening zippers, holding scissors.
Eventually, Mohamed bites the carrot every time he lifts his right hand to his mouth.
"Yay! Good job," says Ms. Balusek.
Speech therapist Courtney Bertrand helps the boys with verbal skills. Almost daily, the boys sing the songs they learned before the separation surgery.
When they finish singing "Row, row, row your boat," Mohamed says, "Wo?" When they sing "If you're happy and you know it, say hooray," the boys chorus loudly, "Ooway!"
They're also learning Arabic words from their parents and brother.
A couple of weeks ago, Mrs. Abu el-Wafa called her mother's home in Egypt. For the first time, the boys' grandmother, uncles and older sister heard their voices.
"The boys were blowing kisses over the phone and saying 'hello,' " Mrs. Abu el-Wafa says. They even said "Grandma" in Arabic. Nobody wanted to hang up, she says.
Every afternoon about 2, the boys are pulled in wagons along the hospital's hallways – sometimes by their mother and older brother, sometimes by Naglaa and the therapists. This is their daily trek to physical therapy. In every hallway, people stop to peer into the wagons.
"Our little heroes," one man says.
"There go the wonder boys!" says another.
And in the elevator, a woman looks into their faces and says, "God is good!"
The physical therapy gym has wallpaper with hippos, zebras and lions, and the mat on the floor is made of giant red, yellow, green and blue squares.
Here the boys do some of their hardest work. The therapists help them use their right hands to toss balls, lift themselves off the floor using their right arms, go from sitting to standing, and in the case of Mohamed, walk.
Neither boy likes to be on his hands and knees. Sometimes they whine or cry when they are made to crawl or kneel in front of a bench to play with toys.
Most afternoons, Mom can quickly turn tears into a smile with a quick hug and a "Don't worry, it's OK," in Arabic.
After some sessions, the boys lie on the mat side by side, relaxing.
They reach out and explore the faces they weren't able to see until they were separated. Their little fingertips touch cheeks, foreheads, eyelids and each other's tight, brown curls.
One day, during a game of ball, Ahmed begins to vomit. He cries, and as his mother and nurse comfort and clean him up, Mohamed stares wide-eyed at his brother.
Mohamed lies quietly on the floor while Mr. Makkappallil puts on the boy's socks, shoes and braces for walking. Then he arches his neck up and around, stretches his arm out and finally finds what he's looking for: Ahmed's hand. He covers it with his own for a moment, then holds it tight.
Renee
cl-Libraone
