THE successful separation of Siamese twins in Barcelona has been labelled another impressive medical operation after another hospital in the city performed a historic face transplant.
The twins were joined at the abdomen before being separated in the Sant Jona de Deu hospital in Barcelona.
This five hour long surgery occurred on November 8 2023 and involved twenty members of medical staff.
These professionals prepared for the operation through the creation of physical 3D lifesize models using images of the twins. This ensured the complicated operation was successful.
And successful it was; the now two-year-old twins, named Khadija and Cherive, live a normal life and are ‘perfectly healthy’ – recently they reunited with the team that performed their life-altering treatment.
The only reminder of their complicated medical past is a scar on their abdomen.
The sisters were born in Mauritius and taken to Spain for treatment as a part of the Cuida’m programme which has allowed the Catalunya hospital to treat over 400 children since it began in 2004.
The programme provides service to children who do not have access to the required treatment in their country of origin.
For Khadija and Cherive their nearest hospital, where Romero visited them, is the Nuakchot hospital which is already 500 kilometers away from their rural village.
There the twins would not have been able to access this transformative treatment.
For many Siamese twins surgery is not a viable option; many are never born or do not survive their first few months due to dangerous places of connection or shared organs.
It is estimated that one in every 250,000 pairs of twins is Siamese.
The successful surgery performed on this pair of Mauritian-born twins is another impressive medical operation to have occurred in Barcelona.
A different hospital in the city, the Vall d’Hebon University Hospital, recently performed the world’s first face transplant using a donor who died through euthanasia.
This surgery was almost 24 hours long and involved the participation of around 100 medical staff.
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