wo-year-old twin girls born with attached brains are developing very well after separation surgery. Erin and Abbey Delaney underwent a risky 11-hour surgery in June 2017. The two babies are now back with their parents in Mooresville, North Carolina, undergoing developmental therapy to improve motor and speech skills and eventually learning to feed themselves.
In 2016, Ms Heather and her husband Riley were excited to learn they were having a baby. However, things quickly took a turn for the worse when they went to the doctor for their first ultrasound. The doctor said they did not have one child but two, but they were conjoined at the head. Ms. Heather felt everything was so bad, she knew what she had to face but she did not allow herself to decide whether her children would live or die.
The two girls were born on July 24, 2016 at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, 10 weeks earlier than normal babies. Conjoined twins at the top of the skull, which are the rarest form of conjoined twins, occur in 10 to 20 cases out of every million births in the US called Craniopagus. About 33% of twins like this will die after birth, often due to organ failure or abnormalities. Even so, 25% may survive and may even be separated, depending on where the skull is fused. “It was the scariest moment of my life. I just hope the kids get through it,” Ms. Heather said. Doctors warned Ms Heather and Mr Riley that the surgery could kill one or both of the babies.
Neurosurgeon Gregory Heuer and his team inserted a balloon into the twins’ skulls to help widen the skin before separation surgery. After months of planning, a team of 30 surgeons, nurses and staff separated the twins on June 7, 2017, when they were 11 months old. This is one of the earliest separations of Craniopagus type conjoined twins.
The two babies shared a superior sagittal sinus, the blood vessel that allows blood to drain from the brain, Dr Heuer said. A lot of times one of the twins connected in this way dies during surgery. However, in this case, the older sister – Erin received the sagittal sinus – but both babies survived. Both were put into a medical coma for a week after the procedure to help their brains recover from separation. Erin recovered faster and Abby was released from her coma that same day, just hours after her sister.
The biggest worry after the surgery is that the twins could develop an infection in the brain around the area being operated on. To prevent this from happening, hospital staff washed Erin’s brain once and Abby’s twice to keep the area as clean as possible. As a result, Abby has had a harder time recovering than her sister. The girl had suffered a brain bleed, three respiratory viruses, sepsis and other complications that required her to stay in the hospital longer.
Right before Thanksgiving, the two babies were moved home.
Currently, the children attend developmental therapy three times a week and visit the therapist once a week. Erin started crawling in July 2018 but Abby still can’t crawl. Erin and Abby’s parents say the children are being fed with a nasogastric tube, but the therapist is teaching them how to feed themselves. Another recent milestone is that Erin just learned to say “Dada”.
