When Lydia and Maya were born last December at the hospital in Bern, they were both attached by the liver and the chest but had all the vital organs allowing a separation to be considered. The surgery should have taken place after a few weeks, when the girls would have gained a little weight because an operation of this magnitude performed on 8 day old babies has only a 1% chance of success.
But due to their deteriorating state of health (one of the girls had too much blood and was in high blood pressure while the other did not have enough), the surgeons at the Bern hospital decided to attempt the operation, the first to be performed on such young children (read the press release in German on the Bern hospital website).
The operation, carried out by a medical team of 13 people, including 5 surgeons, lasted 5 hours. Since then, the girls have again undergone surgery to close their abdominal wall. They are now in a pediatric intensive care unit and have started breastfeeding.
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