System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Ladan & Laleh Bijani, Conjoined Twins
, 1974 - July 08, 2003
The conjoined Bijani twins have died during a marathon operation to separate them. Ladan Bijani was the first to die, followed an hour and a half later by her sister Laleh. A team of 28 doctors and 100 medical assistants were involved in the surgery at Raffles Hospital in Singapore to separate the Iranian twins. The sisters were warned that they had only a 50-50 chance of survival, but said they were willing to risk death for the chance to lead separate lives.
The twins died within 90 minutes of each other after doctors separated them but were unable to control their bleeding in the unprecedented surgery. People cried out in shock or wept as Iranian state television broke into normal programming to announce their deaths during the third day of surgery in Singapore.
It was the first time surgeons tried to separate adult craniopagus twins — siblings born joined at the head. The surgery has been performed successfully since 1952 on infants, whose brains can more easily recover.
The risky, marathon separation procedure began about 10 p.m. EDT Saturday. Before the operation, doctors warned that the surgery could kill one or both of the twins, or leave them brain-dead.
At one of the final points of the separation procedure, surgeons cut a finger- thick shared vein from Ladan — leaving her to rely on a similar sized vein taken from her right thigh that was grafted to her brain.
Rerouting the shared vein, which drained blood from their brains, was considered one of the biggest obstacles to the success of the surgery. German doctors told the twins in 1996 that shared vein made surgery too dangerous.
In the final hours, the surgeons had to contend with unstable pressure levels inside the twins' brains just before they worked to uncouple the sisters' brains and cut through the last bit of skull joining them, Kumar said.
The sisters' brains had to be teased apart very slowly. In the process, the doctors encountered a lot of blood vessels and other tissues.
Although the sisters knew the operation could kill one or both of them, they decided to face those dangers after a lifetime of living conjoined and compromising on everything from when to wake up to what career to pursue.
Parents of the twins, Dadollah Bijani and Maryam Safari, thanked the Iranian nation for praying for their children, the state-run Tehran radio reported.
The sisters were born into a poor family of 11 children in Firouzabad, southern Iran, but grew up in Tehran under doctors' care.
