Conjoined twins separated, out of comas and ‘neurologically sound’

November 22, 2009 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News

The conjoined twins separated in Australia have both come of out of their comas, their prognosis ‘really really good’.

It took two years of planning, a 16-member medical team, 25 hours of separation surgery, and six hours of reconstructive surgery, but previously conjoined twins Krishna and Trishna are now separated. Both girls are “neurologically sound” after waking from induced comas.

The twins, brought to Melbourne from Bangladesh in 2007, were originally given up for adoption by Kartik and Lavlee Mollik because they couldn’t afford the medical costs for the twins. When the Sunday Herald Sun told the biological parents of the successful operation, they were overjoyed.

“I don’t know what to say. I am very, very happy,” Lavlee Mollik told the Herald Sun. “This is such a great relief.”

Mollik told the paper that she had given the children up unconditionally and knew that she had no legal claim to them.

“I won’t want them back,” she told another newspaper in Bangladesh. “I just want to see them once. They are my children and I am a mother. I cannot forget them.”
Children First Foundation’s Moira Kelly, legal guardian of the children, said, “All I can say is it’s a dream come true to think at the end of the week a mother knows, somewhere in Bangladesh, that her two little daughters… they’re alive.”

Kelly hopes to get the twins face-to-face soon. “We are hoping in the next day, probably tomorrow or today, is to bring the cots together so they can feel each other,” she said.

“They’re too weak to look at each other, they’re too sleepy so we’re not there for that yet, but we’re early days and you know, take it day by day.”