When Ervina and Prefina were born two years ago, they joined in the skull, consecutively. For most of their lives, they never saw each other’s faces, except when they looked at their reflections in a mirror. In early June, the twins finally had a chance to look at each other directly after 30 doctors and nurses separated them during an 18-hour surgery.
“We were very, very happy,” Dr. Carlo Efisio Marras, head of neurosurgery at Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital, told TODAY. “Her mother ran to me and she started dancing. She took my hands and started jumping, so after that we jumped together. It was a very, very magical, fantastic moment. “
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The twins’ mother, Ermine, was overwhelmed by the care and declined an interview request, the hospital said TODAY.
In July 2018, the family came to the hospital’s attention when their president Mariella Enoc visited the Central African Republic and saw the twins. She told Ermine that her Vatican hospital could help. In September 2018, the family arrived in Rome and the twins underwent the first part of the separation in May 2019. The second part took place in June 2019.
“They had a very complex malformation,” said Efisio Marras. “The number of surgeries was three because the goal of the surgery was to create new circulation. If we did a one-step separation, the results could be very bad. “
The team examined the girls’ skulls to make sure they could separate them without damaging them. When the doctors determined they could do it, they wondered if they should. They only wanted to separate Ervina and Prefina if they would have a better quality of life later.
“This means, what are the possibilities or opportunities that we can give these girls for their future?” Efisio Marras said.
The conjoined twins of the craniopagus have a “survival rate that is quite low” and around a “death rate of 70.75%” in the first year of life, he added. The twins were a total posterior cranial skull: the back of their entire skulls came together and shared blood vessels. However, they did not share any brain tissue, making it safer for separation. After the surgery, the doctors performed an MRI and showed that the separation did not harm their brains.
“It was remarkable that the brain was absolutely safe and healthy,” said Efisio Marras. “The attitude of the two girls was fantastic because they were absolutely interactive.”
As far as Efisio Marras knows, this is the first surgery of this type performed in Italy or even in the world. He attributes his success to a group of colleagues who work from what other surgeons, such as Dr. James Goodrich, who separated the craniopagus twins Jadon and Anias McDonald in 2016, had done before them.
“The reason we got the results is because the group (of doctors and nurses) was absolutely good,” he said. “There are many things in this process that you should be aware of. We had to consider all the details. “
But Efisio Marras and the team are grateful that Ervina and Prefina have a new opportunity in life. They will monitor them for a year and expect them to develop normally.
“We were very happy because we had the opportunity to separate them with complete success,” he said. “It was joy, pure joy.”
