Separated Siamese have good recovery; see photos – 11/22/2023 – Balance and Health

Siamese twins Allana and Mariah, aged 2 years and 8 months, participated this Wednesday (22) in a ceremony at the Hospital das Clínicas (HC) in Ribeirão Preto (313 km from São Paulo), the same one where they underwent four separation surgeries since August 2022.

The children are recovering well from the final surgery, which took place on August 20th, and are expected to return on Friday (24th) to Piquerobi, a city in the interior of São Paulo where they live with their parents.

Allana and Mariah were linked at the head (craniopagus Siamese) — an extremely rare case. The ceremony to celebrate the good result of the separation also included sisters from Ceará Maria Ysadora and Maria Ysabelle, who underwent the same surgery in 2018.

Ysadora and Ysabelle were separated after five surgical procedures. The last one, one of the most complex ever carried out in the country, lasted 17 hours and involved the reinforcement of American neurosurgeon James Goodrich, from the Montefiore Medical Center, in New York — considered one of the world’s greatest experts on the subject and who died as a result of Covid in 2020.

The ceremony brought together the Hospital management, doctors, nurses and several professionals from the multidisciplinary teams who followed the two cases of separation of twins joined at the head. The surgeries involved teams from neurosurgery, plastic surgery, pediatrics, anesthesia, imaging, technology, nursing, physiotherapy, speech therapy, nutrition and medical arts, among others.

The four girls delivered bouquets in honor of the team leaders and the mothers also received a bouquet in gratitude for their trust and partnership.

Remember the cases

Allana and Mariah

The children’s mother, Talita Cestari, was monitored since pregnancy by the hospital, linked to FMRP (Faculty of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto), USP (University of São Paulo).

The first procedure, on August 6 last year, took nine and a half hours to complete, half an hour longer than the second surgery, on November 19.

In the third phase, in March, they underwent a new seven-hour procedure, with the aim of advancing the separation of blood circulation from the brain. Successful, the procedure led to separation at a rate of 75%.

On August 19, when the last surgery began, the medical teams, made up of 50 professionals from areas such as pediatric neurosurgery, plastic surgery, pediatrics, radiology and nursing completed the dissection of the blood vessels that connected the children.

Furthermore, the plastic surgery team, led by doctor Jayme Farina Junior, was responsible for the cranioplasty, a procedure that closed the skullcap and the skin that covers the head of each of the children.

The children recover at HC Criança, still with bandages on their heads, under the care of the health team and their parents.

Maria Ysadora and Maria Ysabelle

In 2018, HC announced the surgeries to separate the two Siamese sisters. Born in Ceará, Maria Ysabelle and Maria Ysadora went to Ribeirão Preto to carry out the procedure, previously unprecedented in Brazil.

After a few months, several stages of the process and research and planning by a multidisciplinary team, led by professors Hélio Rubens Machado and Jayme Farina Júnior, under the consultancy of North American specialist James Goodrich, the girls were finally separated.

To make the procedure possible, the skull and brain of the two were reconstructed in three dimensions, and acrylic resin and ceramic molds were made in the United States, with all the details, each vein and artery.

The value of a surgery like this was calculated at the time at US$ 2.5 million (R$ 12.3 million, at this Wednesday’s exchange rate) in the US private network. In the public network, as was the case with girls, the cost is lower.

Today, at 7 years old, Maria Ysabelle and Maria Ysadora attend school and continue to be assisted by Public Health in the state of Ceará.